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Getting What We Want 
By DAVID ORR EDSON 



GETTING 
WHAT WE WANT 

How to Apply Psychoanalysis 
to Your Own Problems 



By 
DAVID ORR EDSON, M.D. 




Harper Sf Brothers Publishers 
New York and London 









g)CLA611752 



Getting What We Want 



Copyright, 1021, by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

C-V 



APR 21 1921 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. The Mind as a Machine i 

II. "I Want" and "To Be Great" ... 13 

III. From Archaic to Social 24 

IV. Deficients 39 

V. The Drive for Greatness — I .... 45 

VI. The Drive for Greatness — II .... 69 

VII. Sublimation 86 

VIII. The Psychic Censor 100 

IX. Dreams — I 110 

X. Dreams — II 125 

XI. Psychopathic and Psychophysical . . . 138 

XII. Blonds and Brunets . . 154 

XIII. Mental Inheritance. "Splitting Up of 

Phenomena" 171 

XIV. Man's Psychic Tether 189 

XV. Mental Glossary 203 

XVI. Parallelism 216 

XVII. Dreams and the Archaic 224 

XVIII. Adaptation 238 

XIX. Life Formulas and Hungers 250 

XX. Brain Patterns and the Chemistry of 

Action 263 

XXI. Life Formulas 277 

Blond and Brunet Chart 289 



Getting What We Want 



Getting What We Want 



THE MIND AS A MACHINE 

A LITTLE boy stood with his four broth- 
ers on the steps of their home, waiting 
and eager. A carriage was coming up the 
driveway, bringing back from a long ab- 
sence his beloved mother. 

The boy's mind looked forward to the 
immediate future when his mother would 
hug him tight and kiss him. Behind him, 
though the child knew nothing of this, 
stretched a corridor, a billion years long. 
Through this his mind and body had jour- 
neyed slowly up from First Things to what 
they were that day. 

The five boys ran forward as the carriage 
stopped and their mother alighted, but be- 
tween them and their desire an unexpected 
factor intervened momentarily: the gar- 
dener stepped forward and spoke to the 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

mother, and for a moment she conversed 
with him before turning to her children. 

In the heart of the little boy something 
woke and stirred and spoke. Gone for the 
moment was the love and desire that had 
filled him. Instead the lad thought: "Rot- 
ten old fool ! If I could, I'd kill him." 

Remember, he knew nothing of the corridor 
of evolution that reached far back behind 
him, but already he had slipped back down 
its length millions of years. 

The mother had turned to her sons now 
and they were pressing about her, clamoring 
for love and recognition. The little boy, 
who worshiped her as ardently as the others, 
was on the outskirts of the group. He saw 
what was going to happen. He was going to 
be kissed last! 

He looked about him. A few yards away 
a big rooster was walking sedately across 
the grass. Jealousy and mortification had 
thrust the child's mind from the unendurable 
present far back into the past, and the 
primeval voice that had spoken to his for- 
bears, millions of years before, now sounded 
in his ears. 

"Come," said Nature to the temporary 
cave man, "there is your game. Here is a 
stone. There is strength in your good right 
arm. Kill it! Kill it!" 



THE MIND AS A MACHINE 

The boy picked up the rock and threw. 
There was a squawk and a whirl of feathers 
as the rooster toppled over with a broken leg. 

"Why, David!" exclaimed the mother, and 
at her voice the lad's mind came hurtling 
back out of the corridor of the past into the 
present. "That poor rooster! See what 
you have done! The poor, harmless bird! 
And you deliberately went and hurt it." 

Back into the fold of civilization came my 
mind — for I was that boy. For the rest of 
that day I hovered about while they set 
splints on the rooster's leg and cooped him 
up so that the shattered bone might knit 
again. Only strong parental dissuasion kept 
me from taking the bird I had injured to 
bed with me that night. I was sorry, 
genuinely sorry, yet when I had flung that 
stone I had devoutly hoped to slay the 
creature for whom I now grieved. 

This is what happened. Through the ac- 
cident the mind of David Edson had been 
flooded with emotion — jealousy. In his nine- 
teenth-century experience there was no out- 
let for the impulse that had gripped him. 
There was no gratification in the present for 
a demand that must be gratified. There- 
fore, David Edson's mind drove him back 
across the whole span of human history into 
the darkness from which he had painfully 

3 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

emerged, and there in the primeval, in the age 
where the strong arm was law, emotion ex- 
pended itself in action. Within one moment 
he had leaped the mighty span from the 
present to the Archaic and back again to the 
present. 

My mind — anyone's mind — was and is a 
mechanism, as distinct, as fully governed by 
laws (which are only beginning to be recog- 
nized) as any physical organ. 

Not so long ago, when his stomach re- 
volted against what he had placed in it, man 
gripped his abdomen and moaned that God 
or the devil had smitten him. Later, certain 
of his fellows discovered laws to which man's 
stomach reacted. The sufferer learned that 
when he followed these laws the outraged 
or vindictive Deity that had hitherto tor- 
tured him straightway lost all interest in his 
internal arrangements. So, through the up- 
ward drift of the centuries man came to 
know his digestive apparatus as a machine. 

As humanity struggled ever toward higher 
civilization, the impact of science drove organ 
after organ out of the realm of a displeased 
Deity and into machine classification. Stom- 
ach and ears, teeth and eyes, heart and liver 
— all have been thrust into the jurisdiction 
of science. 

One further step, however, man has been 

4 



THE MIND AS A MACHINE 

unwilling to take. Only now he is hesitating 
on the brink. Throughout the ages he has 
continued to regard his mind as a free agent, 
ungoverned by any law, responsible only to 
his God. 

"My private judgment coincides with 
God's; therefore let no man dispute me lest 
he be sacrilegious," is a feeling quite as 
dominant in man's nature to-day as it was 
five hundred years ago. 

"Your private judgment," the psycho- 
analyst insists, "is as much of a machine as 
your private stomach. It has developed 
through evolution with the remainder of 
your organs. It is governed by laws as 
irrefragable as those controlling your physi- 
cal well-being." 

That is the parting of the ways at which 
mankind now stands, and each year sees him 
turning more definitely to the truth. 

If the little boy, when he ran to greet his 
mother, had been smitten suddenly with 
cramps, she would instantly have assumed 
a scientific attitude of mind. The laws gov- 
erning digestion would have been appealed 
to and the trouble discovered and remedied. 

But because the lad's mind machine had 
beeln disturbed instead of his stomach ma- 
chine, he was "naughty." He had offended 
against the divine will. 

5 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Yet the impulse that lifted the stone, 
flung it, and broke the rooster's leg was as 
much the product of certain laws, working 
through a machine developed by the evolu- 
tion of a billion years, as a stomach ache 
would have been. 

It was not as though the little boy had 
conducted himself quite apart from the con- 
duct of other children or quite free of the 
bias of some kind of influence — child conduct 
is too much alike to warrant such a con- 
clusion. In fact, the resemblance is so 
striking that it seems as though the conduct 
of children would lead us to believe that it 
was the result of former common experiences. 
On the other hand, no child has yet hit 
upon twentieth-century conduct from the 
first, wherein no "bringing up" seems 
necessary. It appears to me that on rare 
occasions, at least, such a thing might have 
happened if child conduct came out of chaos. 
Apparently, at this period of mental ex- 
ploitation, this quality of reasoning seems 
justifiable, at least until it can be disproved. 

Out of the blackness of the beginning 

man's mind machine has developed, wheel 

by wheel, piston by piston, lever by lever, 

through the same endlessly patient, unde- 

viating force that has brought up his body 

from a unicellular being to the tremen- 

6 



THE MIND AS A MACHINE 

dously complicated, delicate mechanism it is 
to-day. 

By resorting to the quality of pragmatism, 
by searching for truth through the medium 
of hypotheses known to be theoretical, the 
psychoanalyst of to-day is striving to learn 
the construction of the mind machine and 
how it responds to the touch of this lever 
or the turning of that wheel. 

For the most part, he must work back 
from the effect to the cause, even as the 
physician of earlier times learned of the 
nature of the human stomach, heart, and 
other organs from the external symptoms 
which their disorders caused, but with an 
added handicap. The ancient chirugeon 
was able to examine the structure, shape, and 
texture of the organs that he pretended to 
be able to cure, through the process of dis- 
section. The mind cannot be placed upon 
a laboratory table and be weighed, measured, 
and charted. 

Hence the resort to pragmatism, even as the 
geometrician has turned to it. "A straight 
line is the shortest distance between two 
points/' he says. "There is no such thing 
as a straight line," replies the physicist. 
Yet on this pragmatical doctrine rests one of 
the great truths of mathematics. 

So, in similar fashion, through pragmatism, 

7 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

the science of the mind is slowly evolving. 
Much is still to be learned. Powerful forces 
still hidden must be uncovered and charted, 
but on a rough framework of first principles 
the mind mechanic is struggling forward to a 
more certain understanding of the mind 
machine. 

First, its evolution. Through the doc- 
trine of evolution — also pure pragmatism 
—man has built up the law of unbroken, 
ever-advancing development from the first 
glimmer of primeval life to the present 
day. 

From the protoplasmic cell, across un- 
imaginable ages and through unnumbered 
forms, the trail has run. Along this tortuous 
way a million species, unfitted for continued 
life, have lain down to die, while man has 
driven triumphantly upward from the single 
cell that was his beginning to the present 
delicate engine of manifold impulses and 
countless desires. 

With the tremendously patient develop- 
ment of the organs of his body — the eye 
machine, the lung machine, the stomach 
machine — has also progressed the devolution 
of the mind machine. Not for an instant, 
from the first faint stir of life a billion years 
ago, has the line been broken. Heir of all 

the ages is man, and from his mind machine 

8 



THE MIND AS A MACHINE 

to-day there stretches back an illimitable 
corridor reaching to the Beginning. 

Let us divide this corridor into four sec- 
tions, each representing a tremendous change 
in the construction of the mind machine — 
a forward step of enormous importance in 
the history of its evolution. Pragmatically, 
let us apply to these sections the arbitrary 
names given by science. 

First, the Archaic; second, the Auto- 
Erotic; third, the Narcissistic; fourth, the 
Social. 

Through the Archaic, the oldest and dark- 
est age, the mind machine was stimulated, 
impelled to movement by purely external 
influences. "I am hungry," said the stom- 
ach, and the mind forced the organism in 
which it dwelt to fare forth to the hunt. 
"It is cold," the body shivered, and the 
mind drove it out into the sunshine. 

From unicellular beginnings up to the 
higher apes, the immediate predecessors of 
man, the Archaic stage continued — the mind 
a machine that would not run unless "turned 
over" by some outside influence. 

The Auto-Erotic marks, to carry out the 
gas-engine simile, the installation of a "self- 
starter" in the mind machine. Hitherto it 
has reacted only to external forces trans- 
mitted to it by the senses. Now there de- 
2 9 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

velops within its own mechanism an impulse 
that can wake it into activity and force it 
to send forth the body it inhabits, not to 
seek the necessities of life, but for self- 
gratification. 

Hitherto the accomplishment of the sexual 
act has been brought about by the stimula- 
tion of the sense of smell, of sight, of touch, 
of hearing, which aroused the mind machine 
to activity and inspired the body to self- 
perpetuation. Now, in the darkness of his 
cave, or the tree in which he slumbers, the 
ape-man wakes and thinks for the first time. 

There is no external stimulus here. Out 
of the mind itself is borne the desire for sex 
indulgence, and the body, stirred into ac- 
tivity by the call of the mind machine, seeks 
and finds. Until the thought sprang un- 
bidden to the mind, there was no craving, 
no stimulus to rouse the emotion of the 
creature. For the first time the mind ma- 
chine is complete master of the body, and 
the direction in which it leads is stamped on 
man's mental inheritance forever. 

Here is born, far back in the twilight of 
man's mental growth, that tremendous mo- 
tive power that through the centuries has 
led man up to the highest hilltops of exalta- 
tion or has sent him rooting and groveling 

in the muck and slime. 

10 



THE MIND AS A MACHINE 

The sex impulse stands always at man's 
elbow and is one of the greatest single forces 
in his mental life. Civilization has trans- 
muted it into a thousand forms. Rarely 
does it appear now in the stark brutality in 
which it came to the hairy old ancestor of 
us all, crouched in his cave or clinging to 
his tree crotch. But, remember, under the 
veneer of our culture, it is still there in its 
stark primeval strength. 

The Narcissistic state, so styled from the 
legend of Narcissis, the youth who fell in 
love with himself, follows. Here the mind, 
which first has done the bidding of the 
senses, and then has learned to command the 
body toward one great accomplishment, now 
learns to love the organism in which it 
dwells. "My beautiful self!" the mind 
machine whispers as it looks upon the body 
it inhabits. 

Because of this love, it cares for the body 
more tenderly than it has in the rough days 
of the past. Because of this love, the mind 
machine begins to show consideration for 
the rights and feelings of others. 

"Get out of the way!" the mind orders, 

jealous for the prestige of its beautiful body, 

and a blow is launched at the intruder. 

The intruder hits back and his blow hurts. 

Hereafter, for the sake of the body which it 

ii 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

loves, the mind machine will see to it that 
the risk of similar injury is not repeated. 
The body it inhabits will step aside and let 
the intruder pass. Thus the foundation of 
society is laid. 

The Social is another great step forward. 
Here man is no longer Narcissistic, loving 
himself for his own beauty and goodness. 
His mind has expanded. He is still inspired 
to the same kind of effort which he inherited 
from his Archaic and Auto-Erotic periods, 
but no longer entirely selfish in its objective. 
He has found that to take care of his beauti- 
ful, Narcissistic self he must give his fellow 
man considerable care lest he — the primal 
thing of all — be injured. It make's him con- 
tent to be a unit in the march of progress, 
while in so being he may make life better and 
sweeter for his associates as well as for himself. 

On the threshold of this final stage man 
stands to-day. Just behind him is the 
Narcissistic stage from which he has not 
emerged. Farther back, the corridor stretches 
through the Auto-Erotic, back into the murk 
of the Archaic. What is it that has brought 
him along this painful and weary road? 
What is the leaven that has lifted him 
through the passage of the ages from the 
single cell, that was his beginning, to the 
creature he is to-day? 

12 



II 



"i want" and "to be great'' 



SCIENCE has determined that minute 
cells of protoplasm, the lowest form of 
animal life, attract one another with a ra- 
pidity that is inversely as the square of 
the distance separating them. Elemental 
life, therefore, has its elemental longing and 
the faint foreshadowing of a mind machine. 

What is this foreshadowing? A desire, a 
longing to meet, to cling together. Thus the 
infinitesimal mind of the earliest of creatures 
held the same impulse that dominates the 
mind machine of modern man — the basic 
biologic law of desire. As the body mecha- 
nism becomes more complicated by additions 
to the cellular content, desires also increase in 
number and form. Whereas the unicellular 
creature cried, "I want!" with a single faint 
voice, the mammal now shouts it in a 
thousand and one ways. 

"I want!" and its opposite, "I don't 
want!" are the two demands that domi- 
nate the animal world. As his sole moving 

13 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

force, they also dominated man in his de- 
velopment up to the end of the Archaic 
stage. 

The cry, "I want!" has its source in the 
five senses. Their demands have to be 
gratified and the reaction of the body to 
those demands has resulted, through evolu- 
tion, in the storing up of a hereditary wisdom 
which we speak of as "instinctive desire." 

The^ chick, on emerging from its shell, 
scratches for a living. The babe at birth 
turns naturally to suckling. Neither of 
these choices is based on personal experience. 
Neither are they a matter of experiment. 
Both the chick and the babe turn instinc- 
tively to that kind of nourishment which 
they require. 

Doctor Cannon's famous experiment has 
demonstrated the force, both mental and 
physical, which has been exerted by the 
experience stored away in the bodily tissues 
during long ages of development. 

A kitten which had been reared so care- 
fully that it had never known pain, injury, 
or fear was tied just out of reach of a vicious 
dog. The little creature had never seen a 
dog before. Yet specimens of its blood taken 
before and after its experience showed that 
during the time it faced the snarling, bark- 
ing animal, large quantities of a secretion 

14 



a 



I WANT' AND "TO BE GREAT" 



from the adrenal gland had been poured into 
the kitten's veins. 

Remember, there was nothing in the kit- 
ten's immediate experience to have made it 
acquainted with fear or a sense of approach- 
ing evil. Yet, under the stimulus of a 
spectacle it had never consciously seen 
before, the body responded to instinctive 
alarm. Immediately it drew upon its hered- 
itary wisdom and prepared to combat the 
danger that threatened. The adrenal, poured 
into the blood, dilated the pupils of the eyes, 
giving a wider field of vision against flank 
attack, contracted the muscles of the body 
for the anticipated blow, bared the claws 
and the teeth for active defense, and by the 
same token gave a greater coagulability to 
the blood to fend against lacerations which 
otherwise might turn into fatal hemorrhage. 

Thus, in the face of conditions wholly un- 
known to the conscious mind, the body 
reacts to an age-old experience stored up 
within itself, not alone in the brain — that 
single organ contained within the cranium — 
but scattered throughout the body in organs, 
sheathings, and in shape itself. 

When the five senses of the beast are satis- 
fied, when he has seen and eaten and drunk 
and smelled and felt enough, he lies down 
and sleeps. He has no further desire; no 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

"I want!" troubles him. So he slumbers 
until his mind machine, "cranked up" by one 
of his hungry senses, cries, "I want!" again. 

And here we come upon the crossroads 
where the mind of man turns aside from that 
of the beast and struggles on uphill toward 
an ideal. 

Man, when his senses are satisfied, does 
not stop. He goete on acquiring experience 
and storing it away in a mental savings 
bank against the time when he will need it. 
What is that impulse that lifts him above 
the level of the satiated and sleeping animal ? 

Freud has said that it is the desire To Be 
Great. This he submits is the great mind 
quality that distinguishes the human from 
the brute. Its force, united with the five 
senses in endless complexity, is the power 
that drives man's mind machine. 

This is the burden that man picked up at 
the parting of the ways when he went on 
and the beast remained behind. In the 
great variety of its combination with the 
five senses of the brutish mind, the psycho- 
mechanic finds, pragmatically, the motor 
force which lies behind all conscious or 
reasoning action. 

To Be Great is a purely mental hunger 

that man alone possesses — a great fighter, a 

great pacifist, a great philanthropist, a great 

16 



a 



I WANT" AND "TO BE GREAT 



villain, a great writer, a great fool, a great 
moralist, a great voluptuary, a great property 
owner, a great thief, even, but always a great 
something. It is a mental driving force, 
quite as demanding as the five physical 
senses, but, unlike them, requires a mental 
gratification. 

Do we demand food? It is all about us. 
Water? It bubbles from every crack and 
cranny of the globe. Sight? Odor? Sound? 
Nature provides them with prodigal hand. 
At the cry of each of the senses, "I want!" 
she holds up the cup of repletion. But to 
the desire To Be Great man must find satis- 
faction through his own works. 

And he must find it. He cannot safely 
starve this appetite any more than he can 
the appetites which he shares with the lower 
animals. His effort to find the food on which 
the To-Be-Great desire longs to feed and 
the effect of either gratification or disap- 
pointment explain his varying moods as 
clearly as his color and weight bespeak his 
success or failure in supplying the wants of 
his body. 

Once the five physical senses have been 
gratified, all physical, all human action, turn 
instinctively to the To-Be-Great drive, which 
is no less intolerant in its demands than the 
physical appetites. 

17 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

No human is so low, so depraved, so 
humble, or, on the other hand, so great, so 
allied with Deity or miracle, that this desire 
or appetite has been overwhelmed. 

"Oh, it's miserable I am with the pain in 
my head," I overheard a man in my clinic 
remark to another waiting patient. 

"Huh!" replied the other. "Now, if ye 
had the pain in your head I have in me 
knee—" 

To Be Great! 

Love, service, education, sacrifice are some 
of the more legitimate foods on which the 
desire flourishes. In addition to these there 
are mental "quick lunches" ready at the 
hand of the starving ego — fantasies, lies, ex- 
aggerations, alcohol, morphine, blows, and a 
gift to belittle. Ash-barrel foods these may 
be, but they serve as a provision to forestall 
the effects of the utter starvation which leads 
to crime, insanity, death. 

An old and valued patient visited me to lay 

bare a family difficulty that was fast getting 

the better of his control. This is a very 

common situation — the fact of there being 

something within oneself which supersedes 

logic and the reasoning mind; a basic hunger, 

for the want of a particular food, putting 

out of gear the whole mechanism itself. 

My patient had been getting pale and thin, 

18 



it 



I WANT" AND "TO BE GREAT" 



morose and uncongenial, though no physical 
trouble could be found. In a burst of con- 
fidence he said that his wife was constantly 
"picking on" him. She found fault, he said, 
with everything immediately upon his arrival 
at home after a hard day's work. 

Under questioning, he said that it was not 
every night that she displayed this captious 
spirit. Some evenings, he admitted, she was 
all any man could desire as an agreeable 
companion. 

I told him that I believed that his wife 
was suffering from starvation of the To-Be- 
Great desire; that in proportion to her starva- 
tion which arose from her failure to succeed 
that day she fell avidly upon the "quick- 
lunch" variety of psychic foods, chiefly upon 
the gift to belittle. Through minimizing all 
her husband did, she thus satisfied her longing 
To Be Great. 

My suggestion was that my patient see to 
it that hereafter his wife was well fed psychic- 
ally, that when he saw the clear signs of 
starvation of the To-Be-Great desire appear- 
ing he give her appreciation, recognition, 
encouragement, praise. 

I told him that by his ability to do this he 
would remedy her impoverished condition 
and bring her back to normal again. At the 
same time — though I did not tell him this — 

19 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

he would be providing, through affording 
mental food for his wife, similar sustenance 
for himself. For through his unconscious 
confession to me it was plain that he, too, 
was starving. Because of his wife's irascibil- 
ity he was being denied the same sort of food, 
the lack of which was the cause of her 
querulousness. 

Two days later his wife came to me with 
the same story, except that the grievances 
were reversed. Her husband, she com- 
plained, came home at night sour-visaged, 
full of complaints and intolerable orders. 

Again the question, "Every evening?' 5 

"Oh no! Not every evening. Sometimes 
he is all that can be desired in agreeable 
companionship. " 

Almost identical with the reply her husband 
had made to a similar query ! Her symptoms 
were the same as his — starvation of the 
To-Be-Great desire. My advice to her co- 
incided with the remedy I had proposed to 
him. 

"Feed him/' I said; "show him appre- 
ciation of his struggle; show that you recog- 
nize his difficulties; encourage and interest 
him, and do it quickly and efficiently so that 
he may not have to subsist on the husks 
served at the quick-lunch counter of psychic 

life." 

20 



"/ WANT" AND "TO BE GREAT 



iS 



"Doctor," said my friend several weeks 
later, "it works! It certainly works! It's 
raw stuff, for each knows the other is doing it 
and why it is being done, but it works ! 

"Each night when I return home she 
meets me at the door and rushes into my 
arms. I call her 'a beautiful creature' and 
she says Fm a 'wonderful man'! Raw! 
Awful raw! But it works." 

Man of to-day is Adam of continuous 
growth. He is the heir, in a direct, undeviat- 
ing line, to the impulse, desires, knowledge 
that have accompanied him in his upward 
climb from First Things. Spurred on by 
the To-Be-Great desire, he has become civil- 
ized. Thwart this but for a few minutes, 
let him become famished for it, and he flees 
from the terrible present down the corridor 
that stretches behind him. 

The little boy of the last chapter desired 
To Be Great in the eyes of his mother. He 
longed for caresses and words of endearment. 
For an instant his desire was blocked. The 
present became unendurable and instantly 
his mind machine sped down the corridor 
of the past millions of years and — flash! — 
he was a savage of the Archaic period, bring- 
ing down his game with his good right arm. 

A child has offended against some law of 

the household. His mother orders him to go 

21 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

in the closet and "do nothing," as punish- 
ment. Do nothing! One might as well at- 
tempt to hold a vacuum in his two hands. 
There is no such thing as " nothing"! There 
in the darkness of the closet the present 
becomes at once unendurable. The child 
turns to the corridor of the past and retraces 
his steps through a million years. First in 
the order of retrogression he encounters his 
Auto-Erotic period. What trails are un- 
folded of that period of self-indulgence! 
He degenerates, temporarily or permanently, 
according to the strength of whatever To- 
Be-Great desire may try to thrust him back. 

The morphine fiend, the confirmed alco- 
holic, the degenerate cannot stand the weari- 
ness of the present. Blocked in their desire 
To Be Great, they erase the present by means 
of drink, narcotics, or self-indulgence, and 
seek for the food denied them in the year 
1920 in some undated period perpetuated in 
the life cells of their forbears down to the 
present day. 

"The present is unendurable and the past 
is good!" is the cry of the degenerate, who, 
instead of following his To-Be-Great longing 
even in the face of obstacles, prefers to 
expend it on the easy descent into the corri- 
dor of the past. 

These, then, are the pragmatic principles 

22 



ii 



I WANT' AND "TO BE GREAT 9 



broadly sketched upon which the psycho- 
mechanic proceeds in readjusting the cogs 
and cams and pistons of the mind machine 
that is missing or back-firing or steering 
badly. 

The chapters that follow deal with the 
theory and the practice of retuning the mind 
machine. Most of the stories I tell have 
come under my personal observation. A few 
are vouched for by near and trusted asso- 
ciates. The usual procedure of story-telling 
is reversed. The climax is presented first, 
but the theme of the story retraced back to 
the clamor of "I want!" and "To Be 
Great!" and perhaps far down the corridor 
through which we have all marched upward 
from darkness to the light. 



Ill 

FROM ARCHAIC TO SOCIAL 

THE new-born baby, still in the physi- 
cian's hands, lifts up its voice in a 
feeble, wailing cry. Except to the exhausted 
woman who has borne him and the anxious 
man from whom he has sprung, it is a far 
from impressive sound — only a weak cater- 
waul, rising in protest against the world in 
general as it affects its newest citizen. 

Yet a tremendous thing has taken place. 
The mind of a new man has spoken for the 
first time. 

Down through the immemorial past the 
little body has come, through the million 
forms that stretch back to the tiny globule 
of protoplasm which was his beginning. All 
these aeons hereditary experience has been 
packed away in forbear after forbear, so 
that this little ultimate son may, through 
their suffering, be a little better fitted to cope 
with life. 

And now, after the nine months of gesta- 
tion, during which the embryo in its develop- 

24 



FROM ARCHAIC TO SOCIAL 

ment has spanned with amazing swiftness the 
bridge that stretched from the protozoa to 
the human, across the flow of a billion years, 
the child is born. At once a new mind 
springs also into life. By the wail that the 
baby gives another voice is added to the 
chorus that has come swelling down the ages 
ever since life began. 

"I want!" the new man shouts to the 
universe. "I don't want!" 

"I want warmth and food and quiet. I 
don't want the rush of air into my lungs, 
the tremendous experience of first awaken- 
ing. I want! I don't want!" 

The mind has started. Death alone can 
stop it. From now on for scores of years 
that same cry will go resounding through the 
corners of the world from the new body which 
the new ego is destined to inhabit. 

Man's first cry sounds the keynotes of the 
whole course of his existence and forms the 
basis of the framework upon which all of his 
future mental processes are to be hung. A 
little later a second desire To Be Great will 
arise inside him, which will determine the 
exterior covering of that framework. 

Still holding to pragmatic reasoning as the 

sextant which, whether true or false, will 

enable him to travel these newly discovered 

seas of the mind, the psychologist has divided 
3 25 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

the human adult mind machine into three 
distinct parts. 

First, the unconscious — to carry out the 
machine simile, the boiler of the apparatus 
where the power is generated. Second, the 
foreconscious — the transmission that carries 
the steam to the moving parts of the machine. 
Third, the conscious — the pistons and cams 
and wheels of the machine itself which move 
and do, with power from the foreconscious 
transmitted by it from the unconscious. 

Remember, the mind of man to-day is as 
much a product of the first impulse of the 
senses, stirring in unicellular animals, as 
the mogul locomotive is the direct descendant 
of Watt's steaming teakettle. The steam 
machine and the mind machine are the 
product of an unbroken chain of evolution. 

What was the beginning? What was the 
teakettle from which evolved the delicate, 
complicated mind machine that psycho- 
mechanics are striving to understand ? 

The senses — touch, taste, sight, smell, and 
hearing — they were at the beginning. They 
served man's primeval ancestor for a mind 
and remain to-day the basis, the prime 
moving force of his mind machine. 

The baby is born, after the gestation 

period, to all intents and purposes a new 

graduate of the Archaic. There is little in 

26 



FROM ARCHAIC TO SOCIAL 

his early action to distinguish him and his 
mind machine from the kitten or the puppy. 
All three have the impulse of the five senses 
— the unconscious mind. Through them and 
their hereditary experience the foreconscious 
also cries: "I want! I don't want!" 

The baby, the kitten, and the puppy stand 
at the parting of the ways. The great 
change is now to take place and the baby is 
to turn toward that pathway that leads him 
up and away from the brute. The kitten 
and the puppy will travel the other road, 
prompted and governed only by the uncon- 
scious and foreconscious mind. 

"I want! I don't want!" — the earth cry 
— will be the greatest effort of their mind 
machines. They stand at birth in the 
Archaic. In the Archaic they will remain. 

But the infant goes upward. At his feet 
is the threshold of the Narcissistic period and 
in a few months after birth he surges across 
this threshold with the battle cry of human- 
ity, "To Be Great!" and has turned his back 
forever upon the beast from which he evolved. 

So the conscious mind is born, and the 
first baby statement, "My doll is bigger than 
yours," "My father is stronger than yours," 
is the sign of its awakening. 

First of all the unconscious mind — the 

foundation upon which all mental processes 

27 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

rest, then the foreconscious with its earth 
cry, and finally the desire To Be Great which 
keeps man at work long after the "I want!" 
part of his mind has been satisfied, storing 
away material that he can use to build him- 
self success. 

The baby's first cry, in addition to the 
desire To Be Great, is the formula upon 
which rests the sum of all human expression. 

But it must be remembered that the "I 
want!" cry is the basic drive. Until it is 
satisfied, until the senses have been satiated, 
the tether that holds man is no longer than 
that which binds the beast. Only through 
pacifying "I want!" can the To-Be-Great 
assume direction of our actions. 

These, then, are the mechanical principles 
upon which the psychologist says pragmati- 
cally that the mind machine has been con- 
structed. The machine awakens and stirs 
the instant the child is born. From then on 
it continues to move while life exists, driving 
the human it inhabits up from the darkness 
of the Archaic in which he still stands at 
birth to, perhaps, the height of the Social 
stage. 

The mind emerges tethered to a body 
which it has dragged up through the ages 
from the lowest form of life to humanity. 

For a time the shadow of the Archaic from 

28 



FROM ARCHAIC TO SOCIAL 

which it is struggling still hangs over the 
little human. 

At birth a series of tremendous events 
takes place for the baby. The five senses and 
the voice suddenly come into power. Some 
one has diagramed this condition, picturing 
the infant as the hub of a six-spoked wheel. 
Rushing down these spokes toward the hub 
are sensations — sight, touch, taste, hearing, 
smell, and the voice. Through the first five 
the child understands the outer world. 
Through the sixth — the voice — he announces 
to the world his approval or disapproval. 

As yet, the conscious mind is at only the 
first glimmer of dawn, and therefore the fore- 
conscious, with its age-old experience, dom- 
inates the child. Through the voice the 
knowledge won through the ages of evolution 
speaks, shouting, "I want!" or, "I don't 
want!" as the five senses submit shipment 
after shipment for the child's approval. 

Touch the child with a bit of ice and 
straightway the body shrinks away and the 
voice is raised in protest. Cover it too 
warmly and it will thrash and kick against 
the blankets and thereby announce its 
discomfiture. 

In its own brief experience the child has 

not taught itself that the best way to avoid 

discomfort from the touch of ice is to draw 

29 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

away. Neither has its conscious mind dis- 
covered that kicking off covers will bring 
relief from oppressive warmth. Yet within 
the child, on the threshold of the Narcissistic 
period, sits the grim creature of the fore- 
conscious mind, wise with the knowledge of 
a thousand successive generations and guid- 
ing the child by that wisdom, rewarding 
obedience to the law, punishing disobedi- 
ence, protecting when it may, but ruthlessly 
destroying when the offense has been too 
heavy. 

The child at this stage is a co-operative 
protective organization with the forecon- 
scious mind as a central directing office. 
Here are stored the proven experiences of 
thousands of years and by their laws the 
conduct of the child is directed. 

Later, when the conscious mind comes 
into control, the old inhabitant of that cen- 
tral office (the unconscious mind) is not dis- 
placed. All through life his unceasing cry 
of, "I want! I don't want!" is dinned into 
our ears. Again and again, even among the 
most highly civilized people and particularly 
when their conscious mind has plunged them 
into error, the unconscious mind rushes back 
to the throttle of the mind machine, pushes 
aside the conscious mind, and forces the 
mechanism to do its will. 

30 



FROM ARCHAIC TO SOCIAL 

I stood in a saloon late one night where a 
dozen men were leaning idly against the bar. 
Presently a blond lad, evidently a German, 
came through the swinging doors, lugging a 
sack filled with something. He placed it 
carefully on the floor and ordered a glass of 
beer. 

One man looked at the sack and then 
nudged his neighbor excitedly. The thing 
had moved! Others had their attention 
drawn to it and presently one of them spoke. 

"Watcha got in the sack, buddy? A 
dog?" 

"No," drawled its owner. "Snakes! Want 
to see 'em?" 

Snakes. There was no definite reply to the 
query — only the noise of hurrying feet and 
the slap-slap of the swinging doors as man 
after man hurled himself out into the night. 
It is probable that some of the fugitives 
had never seen a snake. It is certain that 
their conscious minds had given them no 
definite picture of what might happen if the 
German opened his sack. 

What really took place in each of them 
was that the conscious mind was half asleep 
at the throttle, drugged with alcohol and 
stifled with idleness. The word "snakes" 
had aroused the grim old inhabitant of the 
foreconscious central office, and he had 

31 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

charge of the situation in a flash. Therefore 
the men ran, as their ancestors in the dark 
Archaic times ran. 

Through his five senses the child first 
awakens to life. He can therefore feel 
nothing but himself. It is not the sunlight 
that gives him pleasure, but his own body 
that receives the warmth. He does not 
attribute the tinkling of a bell to that in- 
strument, but to his own ears. There is 
nothing in the world of reality for him but 
his own sensations. 

Hence he ernerges from the last frontier of 
the Archaic into the Narcissistic through love 
of his own beautiful self. His is not the 
thought of service to the world or sacrifice 
for some one else. He lives for himself and 
does everything in his power to give himself 
a comfortable and happy time. 

Here begins the domination of his con- 
scious mind, collecting the results of experi- 
ments pleasant and disastrous, devising al- 
ways fresh means of gratifying this self-love. 
Soon this love is affected by the desire To Be 
Great — to be great so that his own beautiful 
self may win admiration or love or applause. 
To himself the child is now the greatest 
thing in the world and he will go to almost 
any lengths to keep himself converted to this 
theory. 

32 



FROM ARCHAIC TO SOCIAL 

Joe and I were sent to dancing school, a 
loathsome ordeal inflicted upon me by stern 
parents. I went because I had to, and Joe 
because we never went anywhere separately 
when we could possibly avoid it. Joe and I 
were chums — the David and Jonathan in a 
group of kindred souls. Each found in the 
other the gratification of the Narcissistic 
desire To Be Great. The chief reason for 
my admiration of Joe was his ability to stand 
on his head long after the normal human 
would have succumbed to apoplexy. And 
Joe looked up to me because I could squirt 
water through my teeth farther than anyone 
else in our neighborhood. 

Trussed up and beribboned in equal splen- 
dor, we went to the dancing school. Joe had 
difficulty in breathing; so had I. Mutual 
suffering standardized the matter to ordinary 
reality and we set forth with little complaint. 

We arrived late the first day and were 
placed upon chairs against one side of the 
room, where we remained seated through a 
long lesson while mutiny smoldered in our 
bosom. The lesson concluded with an ex- 
hibition waltz by a dozen "young smarties," 
to the delight of their fond mothers and the 
hot resentment of Joe and me. 

Resentment turned to scorn and scorn to 
jealousy while the waltz tinkled on and 

33 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

we fidgeted in our chairs. In Joe's and my 
ears the Narcissistic was whispering hotly. 
Some one else was getting applause while 
our beautiful selves were wholly neglected. 

The waltz ended in a patter of handclap- 
ping. I nudged Joe and Joe nudged me. 
We had made no plan, but our minds traveled 
the same road and we knew. 

"Go on, Joe. Show 'em! By golly! if I 
had a mouthful of water, I would!" 

Little Joe slid off his chair and swaggered 
to the center of the room. There without 
pomp or ceremony he put his little bullet 
head to the floor and hoisted his sturdy legs 
in the air. Applause? We drank our fill 
of it then, for Joe just stayed there. His face 
turned purple, but he never wavered. If 
my mother had not rushed upon him and 
set him right side up he would probably be 
there yet. 

That is the basic drive of the Narcissistic. 
In varied form it is repeated, over and over, 
through the life of every human. In the 
case of the child — often the man, if his mind 
fails to cross the Narcissistic border — action 
is inspired only to obtain admiration or 
Narcissistic satisfaction. The mechanism of 
things, their service in procuring the bodily 
necessities of life, their value to the herd, have 
no place whatever in the Narcissistic mind. 

34 



FROM ARCHAIC TO SOCIAL 

Joe may have been spanked for injecting 
a rowdy note into the aesthetic confines of the 
dancing class — I do not remember if he was — 
but if his self-inversion reaped that reward 
it is probable that he did not repeat the 
exhibition. 

The next time he felt impelled to advertise 
his beautiful self by standing on his head the 
recollection of the vengeance the world had 
taken upon him following an earlier similar 
attempt would probably have deterred him. 
In other words, through his Narcissistic im- 
pulse and its painful result, Joe would have 
drawn nearer the Social stage — at present the 
highest development of the mind machine. 
He would have suppressed his desire to be 
great for his beautiful self's sake because 
experience told him that the herd would 
punish that form of self-exploitation. 

A bully swaggers along the sidewalk, grati- 
fying his desire To Be Great by pushing 
weaker persons off into the gutter. Sooner 
or later he meets some one with an equally 
strong hunger for greatness. This person 
resents the insult, and this resentment, 
purely Narcissistic, impels him to knock 
the bully down. Picking himself up, the 
assaulted one goes his way meekly and 
decorously. 

Through the clash of Narcissistic de- 

35 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

sires he has been hurled, temporarily at 
least, into the Social stage. He shows re- 
gard for the feelings of the herd by pushing 
no more of its members off the sidewalk. 

My first day of school found me as ardent 
and complete a Narcissist as ever existed. 
Accordingly, when at recess I was turned 
out into the yard with a hundred other 
boys the To-Be-Great hunger demanded 
immediate gratification. I began at once 
to lacerate the feelings of the herd by as 
objectionable a series of self-advertisements 
as my Narcissistic mind could devise. 

I ran; I shouted; I pommeled boys; I 
pushed them over; I intruded upon games 
with the avowed purpose of breaking them 
up, and at length destiny led me to a circle 
of boys squatting about a marble ring. 

One of them was crouching, about to 
shoot, and my "ego drive" shouted that it 
would be a splendid thing to leapfrog over 
his back. I misjudged distance and my 
own strength and tumbled over the boy 
into the marble ring. 

In the debacle I scraped my knee so that 
the bleeding skin showed through my 
stocking. At home, where self-advertise- 
ment in this violent form was not heeded, 
I should probably have wailed aloud. By 
now the chagrin at my leapfrog failure was 

36 



FROM ARCHAIC TO SOCIAL 

swallowed up in a new desire To Be Great. 
I would not cry! In this way I would call 
the attention of all beholders to the stalwart 
qualities of my beautiful self. 

I laughed raucously and scornfully and 
immediately there fell upon me the unheard- 
of thing! I was punched! I was kicked! 
My eye, my nose, my ringing ears sent forth 
frantic cries of, "I don't want," which 
completely obliterated the earlier protest 
of my injured knee. Finally the punish- 
ment administered by the other outraged 
Narcissists ceased and a dazed and bitterly 
sobbing small boy was allowed to stagger 
from the tumult. 

Yet despite the confused clamor of all the 
injured feelings of my Narcissistic self a new 
idea had been brought home to my mind 
machine. For the first time in my life I 
had collided with the Social stage. It 
dawned upon me that the feelings of others 
must sometimes be regarded so that my 
own precious feelings should not be ravished. 

The dusty, bedraggled small boy had been 
thrown by an explosion of his own devising 
up from Narcissism to the borders at least 
of the Social. In the few brief years since 
his birth he had traveled upward, through 
the urge of mind, from the shadow ofthe 
Archaic in which he was born to the lower 

37 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

level of the highest stratum which man has 
yet attained in his struggle upward from 
darkness to light. 

The laws of the mind, like the laws that 
govern everything in this world, are, as we 
have seen, of biologic growth. Nature has 
guided our hands in the framing of them 
and uses our fellows to scourge us when we 
offend against them. 

It is the purpose of the psychoanalyst 
to become skilled in the law of the mind 
machine. It is his hope to become so 
expert in his chosen profession that he 
may give those whose minds are "sick" 
the same comfort and help which the 
stomach specialist can offer to him who 
has offended against the laws of gastronomy. 

Not only the scientist, but the average 
man as well, may become no mean mind 
mechanic if he will give to that delicate and 
complex engine as much thought as he 
bestows, if he is wise, on that more material 
mechanism, his stomach. 



IV 

DEFICIENTS 

THROUGH years of research, coupled 
with pragmatic reasoning, science has 
established what it holds to be at least a 
working conception of the evolution and 
present construction of the human mind. 
By simile and metaphor, it has translated 
that abstract thing into concrete terms, 
which we have already named a threefold 
mechanism — unconscious, foreconscious, and 
conscious — each part with a definite and un- 
deviating function ascribed to it, yet each 
drawing its basic force from its predecessor. 

Pragmatically we have traced its evolution 
according to the laws of biology which scien- 
tific pragmatism must regard. All life, all 
nature, is subject to these laws of certain, 
gradual, logical development. So is speech. 
So must be the growth of the human in- 
tellect. 

Thus science has designed and built for the 
purpose of further research and instruction a 
theoretical model of the perfect mind machine. 

39 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

"This mechanism," it says, "is what the 
mind of man should be. It will react to 
stimuli and sudden impulses as the mind of 
man should act under similar conditions." 

But the mind of no one man fills all the 
specifications or performs identically the 
actions of the model mind machine. There 
are wide divergencies. The world has come 
to speak of the manifestation of these 
divergencies as Personality and Character. 

The mind of any human is not the smooth- 
running sure machine that science has estab- 
lished as the ideal. Man's mind machine 
varies in the individual as much as it does 
in the features. Yet it may be stated that it 
acts in conformity with its basic mechanism, 
varying only when it is much affected by the 
vicissitudes of life. 

The minds of John Jones and Henry Smith 
are constructed on the same principle as the 
typical mind machine of scientific theory. 
They have the same divisions; they respond 
to the same impulses. But in operation the 
mind machine of John Jones grinds and 
hesitates and at times even misses fire, while 
Henry Smith's mental mechanism works 
smoothly and efficiently and under certain 
conditions and stimuli attains a speed be- 
yond even that of the typical machine. 

In other words, the characters of Jones 

40 



DEFICIENTS 

and Smith are as unlike as their faces. Jones, 
with his halting, inefficient mind machine, 
is what the world stigmatizes as "deficient." 
Smith, with his above-normal mind, may be 
what the world calls a genius. 

It is probable that the world will do honor 
to Smith and injustide to Jones, since it is 
accustomed to take into account not causes 
but results; not the root and the soil in which 
it flourishes, but the blossom it bears. 

Yet the pathetic part of it is that Smith 
is little more responsible for his greatness 
than Jones is for his inability. Each came 
into the world with unconscious and fore- 
conscious minds — two thirds of the entire 
mind machine — already constructed by the 
hands of the centuries. It is not Jones's 
fault that the mechanics who constructed 
his conscious mind were of a less enlightened 
type than those who worked upon Smith's 
machine. In each was born and flourished 
the hunger To Be Great, but with this dif- 
ference: one man lived in an environment 
that contributed bountifully to his desire 
To Be Great; the other in an environment 
which contributed practically nothing that is 
approved by Society. The desire To Be 
Great worked hand in hand with the fore- 
conscious question, "How to be great?" and 

the result obtained by these two forces in 
4 41 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

co-operation resulted in the characters of 
Henry Smith, perhaps the respected leader 
of men, and of John Jones, perhaps the gun- 
man or vagabond. 

All through the life of every human the 
conscious mind impelled by the desire To Be 
Great — shot from the foreconscious mind — 
is standing at the throttle and steering wheel 
of the mind machine, guiding that mecha- 
nism, efficient or inefficient, as the case may 
be, toward gratification of that desire. 

Through experience, the conscious mind 
works to that end. It learns that by certain 
mental and physical actions it can pacify the 
eternal hunger for success, and these actions 
eventually become crystallized into formulas 
on which man bases his conscious existence. 

One conscious mind wakes into activity 
in the slums. It assumes control of a mind 
machine badly assembled through genera- 
tions of ignorance and low-grade ancestry — 
a machine that travels better down hill than 
up. The foreconscious mind with the crav- 
ing To Be Great drives the conscious mind 
toward the satisfaction of that desire. Pres- 
ently it finds what it believes to be the 
certain road toward the satisfaction of that 
hunger. The man may become a gang 
leader, a trafficker in women, a bouncer, a 

saloonkeeper. 

42 



DEFICIENTS 

Another mind is born, embodied in the 
offspring of intelligent, cultured parents. Its 
inheritance is clean and fine. Its environ- 
ment is certain to bring out what is best in 
the newcomer. An entirely different desire 
for greatness from that cherished by the slum 
dweller comes into being. Other formulas 
of procedure are laid down. The child be- 
comes a lawyer, a teacher, a philosopher. 

I remember as a boy going into the hayloft 
and reaching up under the eaves, where I 
kept my secret treasury of marbles, to dis- 
cover that they had disappeared. As I 
groped round desperately a picture of Bill 
Williams flashed into my mind — Bill, who 
had recently contracted a habit, a nervous 
trick, of reaching up high above his head 
with his left hand. 

I slid down the ladder from the loft, 
sought out Bill, and, finding him, as I ex- 
pected, playing marbles, fell upon him and 
smote him hip and thigh. Then I confis- 
cated his marbles. Bill made no protest 
further than to beg for two "alleys," and I 
finally gave him one. 

Later, when adolescence and the increased 
desire To Be Great ruptured the gang of 
small boys, Bill turned his investigating 
mind to a study of alcohol, with the usual 
result of such investigation. That phase of 

43 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

his career became so typical and uninterest- 
ing that I lost sight of him for years. 

The next time I heard of Bill he was work- 
ing on a run-down paper in a Western town 
for $8 a week, but with a contingent fee of 
$2,000 to be paid to him at the end of 
ninety days, provided that he succeeded 
in starting a riot in the town within that 
period. The effect upon the paper's cir- 
culation, should Bill succeed, was obvious. 

At the end of sixty days the contracted- 
for riot was so close to happening that the 
proprietor of the paper became frightened 
and succeeded in breaking his contract with 
Bill for $500. Bill was not unwilling to 
withdraw, for he had not had a drink for two 
months. 

Experience had taught him that by start- 
ing trouble he could gratify his hunger for 
his special type of greatness. He had dis- 
covered and correlated those human com- 
pulsion materials which produce fights and 
riots. Upon these he had built his formulas 
of existence. He stirred up a fight with me, 
and he got an "alley" out of it. He prodded 
the population of a Western town into battle 
fury and got $500. Unusual experience had 
coupled up with Bill's desire To Be Great 
and had formed Bill's personality. 

So in each one of us the inherited machine 

44 



DEFICIENTS 

— the unconscious and foreconscious mind — 
co-operates only with the conscious to get 
what man needs for existence during his 
immediate tenure of office. Nothing that 
man says, nothing that he concludes or does, 
can be for any purpose, basically, but the 
dominant one of self-gratification — that is, 
life with prolongation — presided over by the 
unconscious mind— and the hunger To Be 
Great — presided over by the foreconscious 
mind. They are the only motivating forces 
in his existence. 

Words that he speaks, conclusions that 
he makes, may be intrinsically false at a 
twentieth-century level, but as long as the 
To-Be-Great desire remains unleashed and 
the physical appetite ungratified they ex- 
press infallibly his own desires, his necessities. 

"That is not true," a physician said to me, 
passionately, when I advanced this theory 
in his presence. "Doctor, my wife is ill. 
She has a carcinoma " — a particularly violent 
form of cancer — "in her breast. I have 
diagnosed her case. She cannot live more 
than a year. I know that. I say it. They 
are words ! It is conclusive. Yet God knows 
it is not what I desire." 

"Friend," I said, "if you will bear with 
me, if you will look at this psychologically 
and believe that it is the scientific and not 

45 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

the personal element of which I speak, I 
will explain to you your mental mechanism 
and your unconscious wish. You say your 
wife is dying of cancer of the breast. You 
say that is not what you desire. I tell you 
it is! Who diagnosed her condition as can- 
cerous? You. Who has refused to allow 
the element of error to intrude upon his 
diagnosis? You. Who has declined to con- 
sider mistake as possible and has disregarded 
the strange things that the future may 
bring? You. In this diagnosis you have 
regarded yourself as infallible. So strong 
is your hunger To Be Great as a diagnosti- 
cian, so great is your desire to believe your- 
self absolute in your knowledge that you 
prefer to believe in yourself at the expense 
of your wife's life. As a result you have 
already killed her in your own mind. She 
lies already buried, slain by your complex 
To Be Great, by your own egotism. She 
waits in her room your coming, a living 
corpse, and faces each day her widowered 
husband, because you cannot do otherwise 
than believe what you pre-eminently and 
mechanistically desire!" 

Five years have passed and she is in good 
health. 

Which was right ? 

So, with its goal always the gratification 

46 



DEFICIENTS 

of the infinitely complexed "I-want" and 
"To-Be-Great" desires, man's mind machine 
drives him ahead through life, slowly and 
blunderingly or swiftly and surely, according 
to the power and efficiency latent in the 
engine itself. 

The time is coming when the owner of a 
mind machine that is not running properly 
will take it to a psychoanalyst — a mind- 
engine mechanic — for overhauling and repair, 
as naturally as to-day he takes his auto- 
mobile to a garage or his deranged stomach 
to a specialist. 

So far we have looked upon the mind of 
man as something wholly distinct and apart 
from the body it inhabits. Our picture of 
the mind machine is a mechanism prompting 
and driving our physical being, but almost 
entirely independent of it. This is not a 
true picture. 

Up through the ages the mind and body 
have come together; they have developed 
side by side and during this interminable 
association have become interlaced and com- 
mingled inextricably. In fact, it has been 
through concrete diseases of the body that 
the investigator has stumbled upon many of 
the carefully hidden secrets of the mind 
machine. 

Certain diseases of the brain and the 

47 






GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

spinal cord, it was discovered long since, 
will destroy the functions of an organ, quite 
as readily as will amputation, and also the 
reverse. The destruction of a functionating 
organ will destroy tracts and centers in the 
nervous system. From these facts it was 
possible for science to locate the tracts in 
man's nervous system that govern the vari- 
ous parts of his body. From this the next 
step was quite natural. Failure of various 
parts of the body to react normally was 
found to augur injury to the nervous tract 
governing it. 

In other words, a broken mind machine 
was found to react invariably upon the 
physical body it inhabited as surely as a 
broken body had reacted since the beginning 
upon the mind machine. 

Binet, the great psychologist, who made 
an exhaustive study of the phenomena of the 
mind during the Narcissistic period, ad- 
vanced the quest a great stride farther. 
Through observance of and experiment with 
children he evolved the following : 

Each of the five great highways upon which all 
impressions of the outside world are brought to the 
child — the five senses — must be kept smooth and 
traffic must be regulated, else congestion and faulty 
delivery will inevitably result, and the child will be 
debarred from a full appreciation of this particular 

4 8 



DEFICIENTS 

sense. Not this alone. By the clogging' of one of the 
highways of the senses it was found that the other 
four roads were also partially blocked and the child 
was excluded somewhat from all fields of reality. 

Thrust a pin into a child who has a sore finger or a 
rash that itches intolerably. Immediately the pain 
of the metal in his flesh rushes into his mind, upset- 
ting orderly traffic on the highway of touch and 
checking all other delivery. The child knows that 
he is being hurt by a pin and screams. The brutal 
drive along the road of his touch sense has com- 
pletely shut off from him the ache of the sore finger, 
the itch of the rash. The agony of the pin is all 
that he feels. 

And in the transport of protest against this out- 
rage the other four sense highways also become 
partially clogged. While suffering intense pain one 
can have no appreciation of a picture, cannot read 
with any intelligence, cannot listen with delight to 
music or speech, cannot take real joy in food set 
before him. The violence done his sense of touch has 
not only upset its own road, but has also partially 
congested all other roads of consciousness. 

The researchers in psychologic work have named 
this injury which will block the free flow of informa- 
tion through a physical sense yet will not damage 
its vital integrity, a Somatic injury. 

Binet, in his study of individual leakages 
and faults in the human mind machine, 
with their accompanying bodily effect, pres- 
ently made a still broader and more sig- 
nificant discovery. He was dealing with a 
mechanism as much the product of evolu- 

49 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

tion as the body of man itself. There could 
be no doubt that certain diseases of the 
body, certain violence committed upon it, 
left ineradicable traces upon that body's 
descendants generations afterward. Why, 
then, should defects of the mind machine 
which had previously been damaged be mani- 
fested in that human body which the mind 
inhabited ages afterward? 

Deficiency, Binet determined, was neither 
the will of God nor the result, always, of 
some injury sustained in the immediate life- 
time of the deficient child. 

"I find thousands of children," said Binet, 
"unable to do those very things required of 
co-ordination and reciprocal muscular ac- 
tion, that experiment and investigation have 
proved must be due to injury or disease. 
Yet these very children have neither phys- 
ical mark of injury nor trace of disease 
upon them. The answer is as Binet puts it : 

There are thousands of otherwise splendid children 
whose sense highways are wholly or partially blocked 
because they were injured from two to two thousand 
years before they were born. 

Tom Wooley was a member of my gang. 
He was an amusing companion always and 
a good partner in all of our games except 
"Duck on the Rock." At this Tom was a 

So 



DEFICIENTS 

lamentable failure. He was never chosen, 
but always fell to the lot of that unfortunate 
side which got the "left-over." For he 
could not throw a stone. So imperfect was 
his muscular co-ordination that he could 
not release the missile at what is called the 
psychological moment. 

The only safe thing near Tom when he was 
throwing the stone was the "duck on the 
rock." But it almost seemed in atonement 
that Nature had given Tom compensation 
in the shape of an uncanny gift in winning the 
love and obedience of animals. Dogs, cats, 
chickens — all the members of the brute king- 
dom—worshiped him, and seemed to devote 
their little minds to fulfilling his desires. 

He had a rooster who used to follow him 
about with doglike devotion. When Tom 
told the bird to crow he would not only obey, 
but at command would modulate his voice. 
I can see the old bird now, wings to his side, 
trembling in his endeavor to produce a parlor 
variety of crow. 

As Tom grew older he was apprenticed to 
the village plumber, with disastrous results 
to employer and apprentice. Tom was al- 
ways burning himself with hot lead or de- 
stroying valuable property with his poor, 
awkward hands. Then he became a car- 
penter's helper, with as unhappy results. 

Si 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

He was always falling off scaffoldings or 
dropping tools on his long-suffering fellow 
workmen. 

I do not know how many other crafts were 
afflicted with Tom before his relatives de- 
spaired of making anything of him, and 
said that he amounted to nothing and turned 
him loose. It was a comparatively short 
time before he drifted to the scrap heap. 
From an awkward, unhappy lad he became 
a corner loiterer and later the village bum, 
with mongrel dogs and outlawed cats as the 
only things in the world that understood 
him. 

Yet to-day I never see an animal trainer 
at a circus or a stock farm that I do not say 
to myself, "If Tom Wooley had had your 
chance he would have made you look like 
thirty cents." 

If Binet had known Tom he would have 
been the salvation of the lad and would have 
turned him into a real factor for world 
betterment instead of a clumsy-fingered 
vagabond. Through a series of tests he 
devised he would have sifted and sorted the 
mind of Tom Wooley and would have re- 
turned an analysis something like this: 

The mind machine of Tom Wooley is 
deficient in sensing time. He is as deficient 
in ability to appreciate the definite order 

52 



DEFICIENTS 

necessary for constructive effort as he is in 
knowing when to let go of the stone he 
attempts to throw. On the other hand* the 
mind machine of Tom Wooley is keenly 
alive to situations beyond the grasp of the 
average mental mechanism. Through the 
same inheritance that makes him unable to 
co-ordinate physically he has obtained a gift 
rare among men. 

The lad should be taken out of his present 
environment, the inhabitants of which expect 
from him the same sense of time and orderli- 
ness of procedure that they possess. He 
should be placed where his wonderful gift 
of fathoming the minds of the lower animals 
will make him famous and respected. 

The leakages and losses of Tom's mind 
machine reacted directly upon his body. 
Because his mental mechanism was unable to 
grasp the passage of time or the law of 
orderly development he was "awkward and 
clumsy" to all his friends, who knew nothing 
of the fact that his body only mirrored the 
condition of his brain. 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS — I 

ARISING tide comes in across the sand. 
With the omnipotent thrust of bound- 
less miles of water behind it, the whispering 
line of foam creeps higher and higher along 
the beach until it has reached its limit. 

But the advance is not the steady, unre- 
mitting, forward drive of the flowing river. 
Wave after wave plunges in to break against 
the land and then recedes to the great flood 
whence it came. Forward and back, forward 
and back the water swings, but each succeed- 
ing foam-fringed wave runs up a little higher 
on the shore. 

As with the sea, so it is with that incom- 
prehensible force that we call life. And man 
himself is the foam on the beach of time, 
advanced, withdrawn, by the steady pulsat- 
ing beat of the limitless force behind him, 
but still — for the tide has not yet reached the 
flood — climbing slowly upward. 

Through the millions of years that the 
tide has been swelling we have caught the 

54 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

sound of the four mighty waves that have 
flung man farthest along his way. First the 
Archaic, then the enormous surge of, the 
Auto-Erotic, then the Narcissistic, and, last 
of all, that great roller that is still foaming 
upward along the strand — the Social. 

These have been the great steps on his 
tremendous journey. These are the four 
great epochs in his history. And the mind 
of man, as I have shown, bears forever the 
marks of these drives, no less than a nation 
inherits and becomes subject to earlier drives 
in its own historical existence. 

Behind each mortal, to use an earlier 
metaphor, stretches the dark corridor of his 
evolution back to that unicellular thing that 
was his beginning. Up through this he has 
come, not with the steady advance of the 
sun from east to west, but with the surge and 
pause and surge again of the advancing tide. 

Man of to-day can be no other than the 
product of his inheritance — Adam of con- 
tinuous growth — for if there had been the 
slightest break in that chain of events reach- 
ing back to the Archaic life, we of to-day 
would not have appeared. Behind his pres- 
ent Narcissistic or Social self stand those two 
grim earlier creatures that once he was — 
Archaic man, the beast with long claw and 
ready fang; Auto-Erotic man, with the spark 

55 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

of the first great impulse smoldering in his 
brain. It is indeed by reason of these 
transitional experiences that man must be 
reckoned with. 

In some of us they are still immensely 
powerful and forever threaten to dominate. 
In others they appear only when man, the 
Narcissist, or man of the Social age, cannot 
supply the endless clamor of the forecon- 
scious mind To Be Great. 

Always the urge of these experiences is 
there, and when because of fear, of weariness, 
of anger, the To-Be-Great hunger cannot be 
gratified by man in his modern surroundings 
and with his modern personal equipment, 
their impulse predominates. The wave that 
has been flung high recedes for a moment on 
the undertow of the Archaic or Auto-Erotic. 
The corridor of the past stands open and 
man, starving To Be Great, flees down it 
until somewhere along its dark limits he is 
satiated. 

When this retrogressive impulse takes 
place no logic may inspire man to act. He 
is smitten with unbearable hunger. If he 
cannot gratify it where he stands he will run 
back to some place that has filled his desire 
in the past and there find relief. No co- 
herent thought or conclusion governs his 
action. He is out of the world of pragma- 

56 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

tism and is being drawn backward by that 
tether that binds him to the beast. He is 
hungry. He must eat, else he will die. 

So he becomes temporarily a man of a 
million years ago, but with a modern mind 
machine. Through this painfully construct- 
ed, delicate mechanism, the drive of abysmal 
man is translated into the terms of the twen- 
tieth century. Thus his words and acts be- 
come psychopathic — that is, sick according 
to the standards of to-day. The psycholo- 
gist hears the words of the present, but 
he knows that it is the primordial speaking 
— the drive of the Archaic or the Auto- 
Erotic — which, having gained temporary 
control of the mind machine, now speaks 
through the patient. 

Man, when gripped by the starvation pains 
of his To-Be-Great desire, has no respon- 
sibility, no thought, higher than its gratifica- 
tion. He may satiate his hunger by any 
one of ten thousand ways. He may lie, 
continually practice deception, seek refuge in 
fantasies — dreams — or become physically ill. 
This last resort is one of the most effective 
"quick lunches" by which the irresistible 
hunger can be gratified. 

"See," the sufferer tells the world in 
symbols, "I am ill. I have been stricken by 
something outside my own body or will. 
5 57 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Ah, but if I only weren't prostrated by this 
malady I'd show you all! If I were only 
well I'd be a far, far better man than any 
of you!" 

Yet the man who seeks to obtain greatness 
by pleading some handicap of the body is not 
consciously untruthful. What has happened 
is simply this: his conscious mind, faced by 
impossible conditions, is unable to obtain 
that food on which he lives. 

"Get out of the way/' his Archaic self 
says. "I know how to get greatness. Let 
me run things and I'll show you." 

So, the man achieves his desire To Be 
Great, not as his present Narcissistic or 
Social self knows greatness, but as the age- 
old man who stands behind these knew it. 

Archaic man walked into my office not so 
many months ago embodied in a young 
naval officer assigned to one of the great 
government war plants. He was a strapping 
lad, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, and with 
the appearance of one whom no food, how- 
ever deadly, could harm. 

But on his face was stamped a look of 
resignation and pain. It was clear that he 
saw himself as a patient sufferer, under 
affliction such as few could bear so well. 

With a martyred air he told of the terrific 
suffering that he had been enduring from a 

58 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

most mysterious form of indigestion. Every 
afternoon, in the midst of his work, these 
pangs would grip him. It took tremendous 
will power for him to keep on his feet and 
finish the day. 

No, it made no difference what he ate. 
He had dieted with no effect. He had con- 
sulted stomach specialists. They had pre- 
scribed for him, but the medicine had not 
relieved him. 

Was he married? Oh yes — this in the 
matter-of-fact tone of one who had taken 
his wife fifteen years ago. 

Any children? No — this with the air of 
one who had had opportunity to rear a 
tremendous family. 

Well, since the entire medical fraternity 
had not been able to diagnose his case, had 
he himself any idea what ailed him? Was 
there anything that he could think of that 
he wanted to do especially — any change that 
he felt would be beneficial? 

Then came the drive, with the voice of the 
Archaic echoing loudly through his reply. 

"Well, I have thought, Doctor," he ven- 
tured, "that if I could get away for a few 
weeks to my camp in the Adirondacks I'd 
be able to shake this dyspepsia. It's deep 
in the woods, on the shore of a lake. I could 
live out of doors — shoot and fish and tramp. 

59 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

If I could do that I think I'd come back all 
right." 

Remember that this man believes sin- 
cerely that he is ill. Also keep in mind 
that he is not conscious of practicing any 
deception whatever. He is truthful, but he 
is truthful at present with the Archaic mind, 
and this has just voiced its great craving. 
Remember also that the desire To Be Great 
is a most movable feast, but in the main 
is dependent upon exhibitionism. To be 
of value to oneself one's conduct must be 
seen and recognized by others. Chief among 
the recognized forms of conduct in man 
when he is seeking for greatness is frantic 
effort to be unleashed from the sordid neces- 
sities of to-day — in short, to be able to ex- 
ploit oneself to the envy of others. For 
some reasons, under present conditions, his 
modern self cannot be great. He is trying 
to flee from an unbearable present. 

In voicing the desire to get back into the 
wilderness the man of a million years ago 
had spoken, not, however, in this case to 
enjoy primal greatness, for he had tasted 
success and was well equipped To Be Great 
at a certain level of the social, but for the 
reason of an utter change of environment 
wherein his former achievements were no 

longer achievements at all. He had married 

60 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

out of his former field of achievements. He 
was starving in the midst of plenty. The 
undertow of the Archaic had pulled my 
patient's consciousness back from the here- 
tofore extreme point reached by the foam. 
Watch now how the drive slackens and the 
wave gathers strength for another rush up 
the beach into the new present. 

Unwittingly he has revealed the nature of 
his To-Be-Great desire, because his Archaic 
mind cannot help but be truthful. Now to 
learn the causes that lie behind this new, this 
special hunger. 

" How long have you had this camp ? Do 
you go there often ?" 

Like a flash the Archaic leaves the throttle 
of the mind machine and pushes the con- 
scious mind into its place. "Here/' it 
whispers, "I'll get you food for your hunger 
To Be Great, but I'll not submit to cross- 
examination. You take charge now. I'm 
through." 

My patient smiled and a look of embarrass- 
ment, not hitherto apparent, came to his 
face. 

"Well," he hesitated. "It's not really 
mine at all, as far as ownership is concerned. 

It belongs to my wife's family, the s." 

He mentioned the name of a man high in the 
advertising poster hall of fame. Nor could 

61 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

he help mentioning his name. It was a 
morsel of annexed Greatness. 

"How long have you been married?" 

"Five months." 

Only a few more questions and the entire 
course of the drive, of which the dyspepsia 
was only one manifestation, lay revealed. 

All his life this man had worked hard for a 
living and, by a superiority of achievement, 
though at a level all its own, satisfied his 
To-Be-Great hunger. Then he married a 
woman who had been reared the daughter of 
a multimillionaire. He stepped into a fam- 
ily that had more of the food for the To-Be- 
Great desire than he had ever dreamed of. 

Suddenly his old objective of Greatness no 
longer served. It was no greatness at all. 
Life had grown richer for him. Luxuries and 
comforts which he had hitherto only dreamed 
of were at his call. But — and here is the 
stumbling point — they came from his wife 
and her people. It was not he who was 
great. She was. The physical ease of his 
married life made his mental existence only 
more miserable. There grew up the hunger 
To Be Great — greater than his wife. 

Unable to satisfy that hunger in the present, 

his conscious mind forsook the driver's seat of 

the mind machine and turned it over to the 

Archaic. The undertow had caught him. 

62 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

"But," said the Archaic, "I cannot be 
great in the city, in modern surroundings, in 
the heart of a great munition plant. There 
are too many above me. To pass them rung 
by rung will take so long that I will starve 
long before I can reach the top." 

But in what manner was he to satisfy that 
hunger? Out of a million years' experience 
his body answered him. 

"I am sick," it said. "These conditions 
are unendurable. I cannot be great under 
the strain of my present environment." 

Through the stomach ailment, called to 
the aid of the mind, the man kept his To- 
Be-Great desire from utter starvation. 

"If I were only well I would be greater 
than any of you," he had said to the world. 
That helped allay the pang. 

"You poor dear," his wife had replied to 
him each night when he returned from work, 
worn by the pain he had endured, "you are 
working too hard. I don't see why you do 
it. Everything I have is yours. Can't you 
possibly take a little vacation? I'm worried 
about you." 

And again hunger was placated, and the 
Archaic grinned to itself as it saw the op- 
portunity to annex Greatness. 

Yet the man to whom this was happening 
knew nothing of the forces astir in him or 

63 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

what their strategy was. He felt his stomach 
ache. He did not know that he longed to 
get away from his intolerable present of a 
clerk in a factory. Perhaps at times he had 
felt a conscious regret that his wife had so 
much more money than he. But he knew 
nothing of the grim, age-old force within 
him that had linked these things into a drive 
toward a definite end. The only question 
that was now possible as his old Archaic 
knew it was to get away from the humiliation 
of being a clerk in a munition plant where his 
earnings brought to knowledge daily his in- 
capacity as measured against the cost of his 
living environments. Sickness would help, 
to be sure, for it would serve to placate his 
own ego as visioned by himself as audience. 
But not so with those who were in daily 
communication with him. In short, the 
whole breakdown was one of the ego starva- 
tion of Greatness. His field of achievement 
was beyond his capacity, at a seventh- 
century level. When he came to me he 
was en route to the seventh or fourteenth 
century, where achievement was possible. 
His brawn and muscle would attend to that. 
Under such conditions — under all condi- 
tions — the mind is continually at work. It 
holds no brief for idleness. From the instant 
of its first awakening to the last breath man 

64 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

draws it is ever in operation — a machine 
whose motion is limited only by the span of a 
man's years. Minute after minute the wheels 
turn and the pistons thrust, grinding out 
material in response to the earth cry, "I 
want," and man's great battle cry, "To Be 
Great!" 

Man's mind abhors inactivity as Nature 
does a vacuum. It must be eternally at 
work. Surround it with material upon which 
it can feed, and its drive will be forward and 
upward. Cut off this supply, and you do 
not slacken the activity of the mind machine. 
It still runs as rapidly as ever, but, unable 
to obtain what it needs in the present, it 
reaches back into the billion years of the 
past and in the Archaic finds the material 
denied it in the present. Too often we call 
this latter insanity. 

So it is with each one of us — drops that 
we are in the wave of human life that goes 
crashing up across the beach. And because 
each drop in the roller is governed by this 
law the wave itself is merely the unified 
voice of its innumerable particles. 

As with man the individual, so with the 
nations of the world. Their actions are as 
accountable to the inviolable law that gov- 
erns the action of the mind as you or I. 

And in these days when boundaries are 

65 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

shifting, and ideals are recrystallizing after 
the Archaic frenzy of war, thoughtful men 
are discovering for themselves what psychol- 
ogists have learned through years of ex- 
periment and a massing of data. 

In the year 19 19, just after the close of 
the Great War, an Associated Press dispatch 
from London brought to my notice that at 
least one man not of a scientific trend of 
mind stood on the threshold of the discovery 
of those things which psychologists have 
learned are the forces which govern the life 
of man and mankind. It was to me a prac- 
tical illustration of the fact that psychology 
was not a theory or science alone, but a 
thing of reality even without scientific data 
of any kind. 

London, May 10. "There are no terms written in 
the treaty that can bring peace to Europe," said 
Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City- 
Bank of New York, to the Associated Press before 
sailing for New York to-day, after several weeks in 
England and on the Continent. "The real treaty 
of peace will be the plan whereby Europe will be able 
to get machinery, rolling stock, and raw material 
and be placed in a position to help herself." 

In other words, you cannot stimulate the 
mind of man or mankind and bring it back 
to a normal state by words, or rules, such 

as a treaty of peace. There can be no re- 

66 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

covery unless you give the mind machine 
material to work upon in its search for 
Greatness. Machinery, rolling stock, . and 
raw materials are all foods for the herd 
desire for Greatness. Mr. Vanderlip is 
quoted further: 

The outstanding feature of the situation is the 
paralysis of production. Much could be said of the 
financial condition in which each of the nations 
finds itself, but I have come to see that there is some- 
thing fundamental even in the solvency of nations. 
There is a direct train of events which begins with the 
halt of industry, idle workmen, the cessation of pro- 
duction, want, social unrest, and then the danger of 
the final act of revolution. 

Observe the tremendous psychological 
truth that Mr. Vanderlip speaks. " Paralysis 
of production" — the lapse of mankind into 
the Archaic state of war, which has over- 
whelmed the desire To Be Great in the 
present by reason of its failure to offer the 
peaceful competitive food of Greatness. 
He finds that there is "something fundamen- 
tal even in the solvency of nations." It is a 
fundamental, as old as life itself, and he gives 
the steps of human retrogression as clearly 
as though all his life he had dealt with the 
mind machines, instead of the finances of 
men. 

'The halt of industry" — the shutting off 

67 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

of opportunity to be great in the present; 
"idle workmen, the cessation of production, 
want, social unrest " — the undertow of the 
wave, the flight of man from an unendurable 
present back through the corridor of the 
past; "and then the danger of the final act 
of revolution — the satisfaction in the Archaic 
of the To-Be-Great desire, denied sustenance 
in the present. 

"I doubt if America comprehends the 
extent of the paralysis of European indus- 
try/' Mr. Vanderlip continues. "Of course, 
we expect idleness throughout the devas- 
tated districts — that is, a comparatively 
small region — but there is a partial idleness 
throughout the whole industrial area of 
Europe, in neutral as well as belligerent 
countries. " 

On the shore Mr. Vanderlip stands and 
looks out over the area that is life. At his 
feet he marks how the undertow of war, 
the Archaic, has drawn the water back; 
he sees where the wave of mankind is slowly 
gathering, after retrogression, for another 
rush up the beach. 

He is as apprehensive as the writer, lest 
the incoming wave that men call Peace 
reach the strand only to be drawn back at 
once on the undertow of the Archaic. 



VI 

THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS — II 

1WAS awakened one night on a sleeping 
car by a sudden lurch that nearly flung 
me from my berth. I sat up in the darkness. 
The train had stopped, and from far ahead 
came the sound of shouting. Some one ran 
down the aisle, calling: 

"Jim, get back with a lantern, quick! 
Number twenty-six is only two minutes 
behind us!" 

For an instant thereafter there was silence 
and then from behind the curtains that 
shielded the berths a score of voices began 
to speak aloud the question that was upper- 
most in my own mind. 

"What's the matter?" 

Neither men nor women thought in that 
first flash of alarm of trying to find out what 
disaster had overtaken them. No one ran 
from the car to see. Instead they obeyed in- 
stinct and remained where they were, asking 
over and over again, "What's the matter?" 

Later, when we dragged out the battered 

69 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

passengers from forward cars — flimsy day 
coaches not yet fashioned into substantial 
Pullmans — which had been turned over and 
wrecked by collision with a freight train, the 
dazed victims repeated the same query; 

"What's the matter ?" they asked, stu- 
pidly, over and over. The shock of the 
disaster had driven all reasoning power from 
their minds. For the moment the conscious 
part of their mental mechanisms was not 
working. The foreconscious, wakened into 
activity by the protest of outraged bodies 
and nerves, drove them to ask that one 
eternal question, "What's the matter?" 

In the terror and darkness of the accident 
the human mind was reacting as it always 
will when confronted with a problem that the 
intellect — the reasoning, conscious part of 
the mind — cannot immediately handle, class- 
ify, and adjust. 

Daily, in my profession, that same ques- 
tion is put to me many times. 

"What's the matter, Doctor?" 

Rarely does the mental sufferer ask: 
"What is wrong in my attitude? How can 
I help myself?" 

Almost invariably in his discomfort he 

assumes the attitude that through no fault 

of his own he has been made a victim of some 

caprice or design of the ruthless outside world. 

70 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

"People always misunderstand me. ... I 
don't ask for special privilege; all I want is 
fair treatment. . . . I deal fairly with others. 
Why won't they give me the same square 
deal?" 

These and a thousand similar complaints 
are poured into my ears each year. In each 
of them is the basic substance of the question 
that ran through the sleeping car when the 
frightened people woke: 

"What's the matter?" 

Because of the extremely delicate and 
sensitive quality of the human mind one 
cannot reply to the sufferer with the blunt 
truth: "There is nothing the matter with 
you. So far as your mentality is concerned, 
you are functioning according to schedule. 
Your mental attitude of 'What is the matter 
outside of yourself?' is natural, since your 
mental mechanism cannot conceive that 
there is anything 'wrong within yourself.' 
Once your conduct feeds your Archaic de- 
sires — food necessities and a superiority over 
others, in shorty a Greatness — there is at 
once established the high principle of ' Tight- 
ness.' And not until that same conduct 
fails to gratify the Archaic desires — still 
active, the unconscious and foreconscious 
minds — will it be discarded from the 'phi- 
losophy of the conscious mind.' " 

7i 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Pause with me a moment and review for 
an instant those forces and impulses that 
must forever operate upon the mind of man. 
We have grouped them pragmatically into 
two classes — the "I-want" cry of the un- 
conscious mind and the To-Be-Great desire 
of the foreconscious. Achievement and Rec- 
ognition are the twin Grails that man con- 
tinually pursues throughout his crusade on 
this earth. He must obtain them or else he 
dies. They are as vital to his continued ex- 
istence as is water or food or air. 

What aids him in his quest ? Primarily it 
would seem as if the conscious mind was the 
source of this propulsion, since it is the guard 
that stands ready to defend conduct. But 
the conscious mind is the youngest and least 
experienced part of the mind machine. It 
is conceivable that it may not be — in fact, it 
often is not — able through itself alone to 
obtain its desire. 

But behind the conscious mind stand the 
foreconscious and the unconscious minds, 
those grim and hoary old fellows that have 
been passed down from the body of father to 
the body of son all through the long chain of 
man's development. In his age-long life man 
has amassed such an amount of experience 
that the conscious mind in its span of three- 
score years and ten may never hope to absorb. 

72 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

Suppose the conscious, by itself, is unable 
to obtain the achievement and recognition 
necessary to gratify its To-Be-Great hunger. 
The foreconscious hears the mutter and pro- 
test of the starving ego, and steps forward. 

"Here/' it says to the conscious, "I know 
how to do this. I know life and this mind 
machine as you can never hope to. Let me 
run things." 

Through the foreconscious mind achieve- 
ment and recognition are attained — ruth- 
lessly, perhaps ; certainly in a different man- 
ner from which the conscious mind would 
strive for them if left to itself. And pres- 
ently because of the Archaic, relentless man- 
ner in which the grim old chauffeur drives 
the mind machine toward its goal, protests 
arise from other humans who have been 
knocked down or terrified by the unscrupu- 
lous forward rush of the mechanism. 

"What is the matter with him?" they 
ask concerning John Smith, whose character 
has lately become eccentric. And, if John 
Smith's conscious mind is still wakeful 
enough, he presently begins to voice his 
version of that same question. 

"What's the matter?" 

A truthful answer to this latter query 
will never vary. It will always be: 

'You are hunting achievement and recog- 
6 73 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

nition in what your mind tells you at the mo- 
ment is the only possible way of achievement. 
It is functioning according to schedule. " 

What is the matter with a man who instead 
of asking deprecatingly that a favor be done 
him demands it as his right ? 

He is hunting achievement and recogni- 
tion. By forcing instead of begging others 
to do his bidding he is gratifying his To- 
Be-Great hunger. 

What is the matter with a man who always 
receives a request for a favor in a hostile, 
forbidding attitude, yet never fails to do it ? 

Again the same answer. He is getting the 
greatest amount of achievement and recogni- 
tion out of the act itself. Instead of saying 
about him, "He's a courteous and kindly 
man," his petitioners remark: "Bill? He's 
a regular guy. Rough, and hard as nails 
outside, but he's got a heart as big as a 
barrel. Growl and swear and cuss you out 
when you ask him to help you, but he always 
comes through, God bless him!" 

One of my patients is the mother of a lad 
seven years old. As early in life as this, the 
child has already evolved a code of conduct 
which has gone far toward convincing me 
that logic and reason are native holdings of 
the foreconscious mind. 

When the child is thwarted in any of his 

74 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

desires — usually they are for cake or candy 
or similar substances dear to the stomach 
of a small boy — he becomes sulky and dis- 
obedient. He refuses to eat the meals set be- 
fore him. Presently he goes to his room and 
remains there, a young Achilles in his tent. 

Eventually the overfond mother appears 
with a tray of food and implores him to eat. 
At first he refuses the material food, and by 
this refusal and the ensuing agitation and 
pleadings of his mother obtains a full meal 
of the psychic food that his To-Be-Great 
desire demands. Eventually the frantic par- 
ent promises him the thing she has already 
denied him if he will only eat his dinner or 
supper, and, having gained all that he desired, 
he finally consents. 

The boy's conscious mind is not fully 
enough developed at his age to have worked 
out the formula of success which he follows. 
It is inherited logic, transmitted through 
his foreconscious self, that is directing his 
search for greatness. 

Charlie was my chauffeur, a clever lad of 
nineteen whose father had been my father's 
coachman. He was working in an auto- 
mobile factory for $15 a week when his 
father begged that I employ him. Charlie 
was a good lad, the old man said. Each 
week he gave his mother $7 for board. He 

75 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

was industrious, honest, and had no bad 
habits. I hired him for #25 a week. 

Three months later Charlie's father came 
to me and begged that I discharge him. 
The boy was going to the bad, he said. 
Rarely did he get home until three or four 
in the morning. The board that he gave 
his mother, freely enough, when he was 
getting #15 a week was not forthcoming 
now that he got #10 more. It was all she 
could do to get $3 or #4 from him. 

I had no complaint to advance against 
the boy. He was a good chauffeur, careful 
and painstaking. The truth of the matter 
was that it was costing Charlie £20 a week 
to get the psychic food which he absorbed 
free in the automobile factory. 

There his To-Be-Great desire was fed 
continually. Other mechanics when con- 
fronted by a hard job called: "Hey, Charlie, 
come and dope this out for me!" . . . "Ask 
Charlie to give us a hand." . . . "Come 
here, Charlie. I got something to tell you." 

Opportunities for recognition and achieve- 
ment were given him continually in the 
automobile factory and Charlie's psychic 
self was fat and well content. 

When I offered the lad a new job his con- 
scious mind exclaimed: "Twenty-five a 

week instead of fifteen? Go to it!" 

76 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

Charlie went to it and promptly began to 
starve to death. The cry of his ego, yearn- 
ing for recognition and achievement, roused 
the old foreconscious mind. 

"Here," it bellowed. "I want food. Get 
it, and get it quick." 

Charlie obeyed and got it. He joined a 
gang that would shout: "Here comes Char- 
lie." . . . "Charlie, you lucky guy, give us a 
ride." . . . "Gee! Charlie, you're a hot 
sketch!" 

The foreconscious mind saw to it that the 
boy got the achievement and recognition 
that his ego craved, but it cost poor Charlie 
twenty a week to get it. 

"Do you ever ask his advice about any- 
thing?" I asked the father. 

The amazed glare with which he favored 
me was a more eloquent response than his 
verbal answer: 

"What! Me ask his advice when he 
shows he's crazy by chasing around with 
that gang of roughnecks?" 

Here was one course of free psychic food 
completely shut off. Charlie could not do 
otherwise than continue to buy it even at an 
exorbitant price. 

Across the aisle from me on an Elevated 
train recently there sat a man literally 
"down at the heel and out at the toe." He 

77 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

talked and gesticulated continually. He 
was very drunk. 

"Watch this man," I whispered to my 
wife, "and see how his foreconscious mind 
makes him perform. You have only to look 
at him to see that his conscious mind has 
failed to get from the world the psychic 
materials he needs for existence. The con- 
scious mind, a failure, has been completely 
deadened by alcohol. He is now under the 
control of his old foreconscious self. Watch 
him." 

He mumbled to himself. He laughed 
scornfully. He frowned in august superior- 
ity. He gesticulated magnificently. Given 
full rein by alcohol, his foreconscious mind 
was feeding him with an experience or com- 
bination of experiences remembered since 
long before his own birth. 

Finally he made a long and worthy speech 
and at its conclusion applauded himself up- 
roariously. You could see that in his own 
mind he stood before a great and worshiping 
audience, swaying it to his will. Some peo- 
ple in the car laughed. Others sneered. 
Yet he, starving for greatness, stood in his 
alcoholic dream acclaimed by a multitude. 

To me it was tragic and pitiful. Here was 
a starved human mind picking desperately 

at the scraps and leavings of a thousand 

78 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

years to find in the past the nourishment 
that was denied it in the present. The prob- 
lem is, "How is this particular man to be 
treated or handled?" The answer is that he 
is already handled and treated by Nature and 
most efficiently. In lieu of the neglect of 
his human brothers to prepare him with 
material marketable in the field of psychic 
necessity — To Be Great at a twentieth- 
century level — he is obliged to perform with 
the materials at his disposal. "Live, propa- 
gate, and be reconciled to your lot," is all 
that Nature demands. We are indeed blind 
if we cannot see that a great thief, a great 
voluptuary, a great beggar, a great mur- 
derer are as acceptable to Nature as a great 
banker, a great lawyer, a great physician; 
the only difference being in the period of 
time, the century of performance. It should 
indeed be needless to say that the jails and 
asylums are not institutions for corrections 
or for the segregation of the vicious — in the 
sense that the world is ever producing human 
anomalies — but for the neglected. Also, the 
occupants of those institutions are merely 
people who have not been raised education- 
ally as most others have from century to 
century. They have simply remained at 
various century levels where they were least 
able to procure greatness. On the other 

79 



. GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

hand, it must be borne in mind — reference 
having been made to this in a previous 
chapter — that self-excuse makes for great- 
ness, provided the unconscious mind — the 
food-demanding mind — is gratified. 

You and I and all the world are as com- 
pletely subservient to the unconscious, if the 
crisis arises, as the little boy, Charlie, the 
chauffeur, or the oratorical drunk. With all 
the gloss and veneer of our civilization we 
can never shake ourselves free of its influence, 
save by feeding it and keeping it content. 
Otherwise it will rise in its age-old strength 
and attempt to wrest away from the con- 
scious mind the control of the mind machine 
— for life itself and the basic law which cries 
live, propagate, and be reconciled is the last 
word in conduct. 

I have at this moment a patient in whose 
ego this terrific duel is being waged. Highly 
educated, about forty-five, with a record of 
considerable achievement in music and art 
in the past, his foreconscious self has risen 
in revolt because he could not supply the 
psychic foods of achievement and recogni- 
tion in large enough quantities to stave off 
hunger. 

His early life was unhappy. His father, a 
man of wealth, drank to excess. Fear dom- 
inated his childhood. As he himself ex- 

80 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

presses it, "I fought my way out of difficulties 
and into such joys as I could grasp/' 

When he was twelve his mother died, and 
her sister, his aunt, kidnaped him. He was 
educated on two continents, and finally took 
up as a life work music and art. In these he 
obtained considerable recognition, though 
the monetary returns were not great. 
Through mistakes of one sort and another 
his personal fortune dwindled considerably. 
His foster-mother's remained. 

When he married, his wife's love for and 
pride in him spurred him on for a time. 
Again he obtained considerable achievement 
and recognition, but of a sort that was not 
translatable into cash. And cash was the 
standard of greatness in the circle of society 
in which he and his wife moved. His con- 
scious mind could not stand the thought of 
failure. The final blow came when he real- 
ized that he would be obliged to give up his 
automobile because of his dwindling income. 

To his conscious mind this stood for the 
complete failure of his fight for achievement 
and recognition. Suddenly that automobile 
typified all that he had struggled to attain 
in life and now he was going to lose it. 

He went to bed. A long succession of doc- 
tors, employed by his foster-mother and dis- 
charged by him, passed upon his condition 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

until he had practically exhausted the med- 
ical talent of the city. Slowly he improved 
and was at last able to get about again. But 
he was never well. He has never been able 
to convince himself that he stands solidly 
on his own feet once more and, inspired by 
this conviction, to join again in the battle 
for achievement and recognition. 

Six years have passed since his first attack 
and still he is a semiinvalid. The heat of 
summer drives him to a country place main- 
tained for him by his aunt's money. The 
cold of winter sends him south, also at the 
expense of his foster-mother. His motor car 
is still his, thanks to that same person. 

As the old hunter displays his trophies, so 
he exhibits a well-thumbed scrapbook in 
which are pasted his early writings — proof 
of the greatness that once was his and might 
be again if it were not for the malady that 
has stricken him. 

"To what heights might I not fly were my 
health only restored/' says his conscious 
mind, wistfully. 

"I am getting you achievement and 
recognition," retorts his foreconscious self, 
"and I'll have a devil of a time if you get 
back your health. Keep away. It won't do 
at all." 

In desperation he has turned to psycho- 

82 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

analysis in a final attempt to drive the old 
relentless director from the control of his 
mind machine. He wants to resume his 
place in the ranks of the great, as his con- 
scious mind sees greatness. He wants to 
free himself of the stigma of living upon his 
foster-mother's bounty. But his forecon- 
scious self won't let him. 

He does not consciously recognize his 
mental processes. He says that he is "run 
down" nervously. To tell him bluntly what 
is the matter with him would possibly drive 
him to suicide. 

" Don't, Doctor ! Don't !" he exclaimed one 
day when I hinted at the underlying causes 
of his condition. "You are talking damn 
nonsense. Why, if I thought there were a 
scrap of truth in what you are saying I would 
go down and jump into the river or else blow 
my brains out." 

His own unconscious admission, as seen 
in his actions, is that his foreconscious mind 
has driven him into a corner. He must sub- 
mit or die. A conscious decision made now 
could lead only to disaster. He has no line of 
retreat from the condition in which his 
unconscious mind has led him. 

His foreconscious self is autocratic and will 
brook no temporizing. "Obey me, or per- 
ish," it commands, and he obeys. 

83 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

So the standards of our civilization are 
being constantly overridden and shattered 
by unconscious minds that cannot get great- 
ness out of twentieth-century conduct. The 
conscious mind may believe in them wholly, 
but let it waver either in ignorance or pretext, 
let the old, instinctive man come into con- 
trol — the man whose entire knowledge and 
experience is drawn from the past — and 
those standards go by the board. 

The form which this upheaval and over- 
throw of the tenets of civilization may take 
depends in large part on the environment of 
the man and his inheritance — what the fore- 
conscious mind has derived from the lives 
of his forbears. 

The drunkard of the Elevated did not go 
to bed to attain achievement and recogni- 
tion. That had not served his foreconscious 
mind in the past, nor had it ever been an 
effective manner of satisfying the To-Be- 
Great desire in his own environment. Going 
to bed could not gain success for him. Nor 
did my patient of literary desire take to 
drink. He did not know that it could 
gratify his hunger. He went to bed and was 
fed. Giving his mother board money had 
never furnished psychic food of Greatness 
for Charlie, so he used it to buy achievement 

and recognition elsewhere. 

84 



THE DRIVE FOR GREATNESS 

Scientific law holds for its warrant nothing 
greater than the reduction of an indefinite 
number of cases to a single formula. If the 
conscious mind cannot get the psychic food 
we need, the foreconscious will overwhelm 
it and attempt to supply the nourishment 
itself. This in its simplest terms is the law 
that governed the actions of Charlie, the 
drunkard, the little boy who sulks when 
thwarted, and my patient who is stricken 
with "nervous prostration." 



VII 

SUBLIMATION 

A LOCOMOTIVE comes coughing along 
an upgrade toward us. Steam, run- 
ning through the veins of the steel monster 
and thrusting with the terrific force of its 
expansion against the pistons, drives the 
ponderous machine forward. 

Whence the steam? From the boiler 
heated by the fire box beneath it. Continu- 
ally fuel is flung into this furnace and the fire 
that consumes it breaks it up into its com- 
ponent parts — energy and waste. Through 
the bars of the fire box slag and dust and 
ashes are ejected so that the fire may con- 
tinue to burn fiercely. Allow the waste to 
collect and the flame becomes dimmer. Re- 
fuse to expel the waste at all, and the flame 
dies, the fire goes out, literally choked to 
death, and the locomotive lags and stops. 

Scientific pragmatism has said that the 

mind of man is a machine, governed by laws 

as positive and unvarying as those which 

drive the locomotive forward. Man's men- 

86 



SUBLIMATION 

tal mechanism is ever toiling along the up- 
grade toward achievement and recognition, 
with the push of the desire To Be Great ful- 
filling the place of steam. Into the fire box 
of the mind machine is stoked whatever 
material man comes across in his existence. 
Some of this is caught up into flame and goes 
toward fashioning his greatness. Much of 
it is waste, slag, and ashes. Of this the mind 
machine must rid itself, else it will become 
clogged, slow down, and eventually stop. 
How does man's mental mechanism get rid 
of the clinkers which the locomotive dumps 
through its fire bars on to the track as it 
passes ? 

My secretary, a woman of keen discern- 
ment, was standing on the curb recently, 
waiting for a parade to pass. Ahead of the 
procession, a police automobile came speed- 
ing up the avenue. In it a patrolman- 
chauffeur was driving two high officers of the 
department to the reviewing stand. A little 
boy darted out of the crowd directly into the 
path of the oncoming machine, which knocked 
him down. He was picked up, howling and 
frightened, but otherwise not seriously hurt. 
One of the men in the tonneau of the car 
leaned forward and said something to the 
chauffeur with considerable energy, to which 
he replied with a strange look of desperation : 

87 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

" Damn it ! I'm tired of dodging people ! " 

The chauffeur did not know it, the people 
who listened to his apparently callous remark 
did not know it, but through this act of 
violence he had dumped his ashes. His mind 
machine had freed its fire box of the slag and 
clinkers that were hindering it in its drive 
forward toward greatness. 

Pragmatically, it may be assumed that 
for some time he had been forced to stoke 
his mind engine with fuel which was largely 
waste. This had clogged up the whole 
mechanism. As a result, the achievement 
and recognition he had obtained were small. 

At least one unsuitable factor in this un- 
satisfactory fuel had been the humiliation 
that he, a chauffeur, had been made to feel 
by foot passengers, who by their stupidity 
or carelessness continually checked the prog- 
ress of his car or made it swerve from its 
course. 

The morning when my secretary saw him 
was the time when his mind was ready to 
revolt against any further subjugation. It 
needed greatness and was not getting it. 
His fire box was full of clinkers. Then came 
the final straw. A child ran in front of his 
car tacitly ordering him to get out of the 
way. Further personal obliteration could 

not be endured. 

88 



SUBLIMATION 

"Get in my way, will you?" said the 
chauffeur's mind, reaching forward eagerly 
to even his low-order chance for greatness. 
Til show you!" 

His mind had refused to accept any more 
fuel of this belittling quality. By his act of 
violence he had dumped the ashes that were 
clogging his mental mechanism. By his 
statement that he was "tired of dodging 
people" he had diagnosed, unwittingly, his 
own case and had voiced a psychological 
law. 

The desire To Be Great, as I have said, is 
as dynamic a force in the human mind as the 
sun's rays are to the growth of a plant. 
Because of its intensity, man's mind machine 
drives only one way. It can stand any 
amount of success and still strive for more, 
but it cannot long tolerate nonachievement 
and failure. 

When these threaten — when the fire box 
is so filled with ashes that the flames are not 
drawing well — the mind machine reacts au- 
tomatically. An evacuation takes place and 
the mechanism has achieved greatness at 
last, but at a very low level. 

A somewhat unfortunate, though graphic, 
name has been attached to this phenomenon 
by psychologists who drew a parallel between 
the manner in which the mind and the body 

7 89 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

reacted toward waste, and because of the 
analogy, termed the mental ejection, the 
Anal-Erotic complex. Under its influence 
the mind throws off those elements which it 
has been forced to take in, but which it cannot 
use, just as the body rids itself of waste 
which, if allowed to remain, would eventually 
cause death. 

A friend of mine recently left his auto- 
mobile standing in front of his door, facing 
in the wrong direction. Another motorist, 
stopping at the next house, bumped into my 
friend's machine just as he was coming out 
of his home. 

My friend, though he saw that not the 
slightest damage had been done, neverthe- 
less assailed the other man with a pungent 
and violent flow of language. So eloquent 
did he become that a policeman passing on 
a motorcycle paused to listen. This in- 
creased audience embarrassed the orator not 
a whit. He continued to assail the careless 
person who had bumped into his car. The 
object of the attack listened quietly until it 
was over, and then, as quietly, pointed out to 
the policeman that the automobile he had 
struck was facing the wrong way to be 
standing on that side of the street. 

The patrolman handed my friend a sum- 
mons with alacrity, for the person so bitterly 

90 



SUBLIMATION 

reproached was the district attorney of the 
county. 

"But," I said when my friend told me of 
the incident later, "if it was such a trivial 
matter, and also an accident, why all the 
language? Had a bad night?" 

" No, but Kate did ! " He frowned. Kate 
is his wife. "She had been handing me the 
rough stuff all the morning!" 

" But the district attorney wasn't respon- 
sible for that." 

He laughed. "I know, but I couldn't hol- 
ler at Kate, so I hollered at the district at- 
torney. Had to get it out of my system 
somehow." Again the mind, clogged and 
hampered by fuel unsuitable for its pursuit 
of greatness, ridding itself of this handicap 
through the Anal-Erotic. 

As civilization has developed, nations and 
individuals have come to recognize and ac- 
cept the Anal-Erotic drive, whether con- 
sciously or not. Tacitly men and groups of 
humans have grown to acknowledge the 
necessity for their fellow men or organiza- 
tions of men to "blow off steam," or — to 
pursue the earlier simile — dump the clogging 
ashes. Republics, through their upholding 
of free speech and free press, are actually 
giving their citizens the easiest and simplest 
possible way of satisfying the Anal-Erotic. 

9i 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Freud has termed this mental process of 
digestion the Political Complex. 

The respectable citizen who grows profane 
and purple of face over the deplorable con- 
dition into which the present administration 
is forcing his city, state, or nation is not of 
necessity an anarchist or an enemy to the 
Republic. His wife, or his friend, or his 
office boy or his employer has blocked him 
in his struggle To Be Great. He reachieves 
greatness by hammering, not the real of- 
fender, but those set in government over 
him. No one cares, and it makes him feel 
better. It gives his mind machine a harmless 
way of dumping its ashes. Were he unable 
to take advantage of the Political Complex 
he would be forced back into the Archaic for 
satisfaction and eventually might achieve a 
lower order of greatness by beating his wife 
or assaulting his employer. 

Your own wife has wakened this morning, 
nervous and depressed. Gloom, intershot 
with squabblings, hangs over your breakfast 
table. For some reason you are unable to 
be great with her. After a hard day's work 
you return home with the clinkers of the 
morning's humiliation and failure still lying 
in the fire box. An invitation to dine with 
me is waiting for you. Possibly in a half- 
hearted attempt to obtain greatness you 

92 



SUBLIMATION 

grumble and protest that you don't want to 
go. Eventually, however, you do. 

The talk at my table turns to Mr. Wilson 
and the Peace Conference. "This man 
Wilson," you say, violently, "is a fool. He 
is meddling with things he doesn't under- 
stand. He's driving the country to wrack 
and ruin." 

I fly to Wilson's defense. We shout at 
each other. We speak of figures high in the 
politics of the nation with a fine disregard 
for the law of slander. We pound the table 
and say things about each other which, if 
we were on any other subject but politics, 
would lead to assault and battery. Eventu- 
ally, having exhausted all your store of 
invective and predicted the imminent col- 
lapse of the nation, you go home. 

A little later your wife remarks : " It does 
you good to get out evenings, Tom. You 
ought to go out oftener." You have cleaned 
the ashes from your fire box. Through the 
Political Complex the Anal-Erotic has oper- 
ated satisfactorily. 

Ingestion of food for the body must neces- 
sarily be followed by ejection of waste. 
Ingestion of food for the mind — words — 
must be succeeded by ejection of mental 
waste. Archaic man accepted his mental 
food, and if it did not agree with him, 

93 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

ejected it at once. He partook of humilia- 
tion and got rid of the waste by slaying the 
humiliator. As civilization progressed the 
reaction followed the action more tardily. 
Man learned to take care where he dumped 
the ashes from his fire box — within certain 
limitations. 

Usually to-day, thanks to the Political 
Complex, he is able to rid himself of mental 
slag and cinders where the ejection will do 
no harm at all. But if this opportunity is 
denied him, if he cannot resort to a mental 
catharsis, the time will come when he will 
react automatically, will throw off the waste 
material without permission from the con- 
scious ego. The police chauffeur did this. 
So did my friend who berated the district 
attorney. 

Civilization has given us the Political 
Complex, but it has also furnished further 
means of escapement — of throwing off the 
clinkers of nonachievement and humiliation 
that are unendurable to the human mind. 
As man has progressed he has devised means 
of eliminating the waste from his physical 
body. He has also formulated a method of 
ridding the mind machine of similar ob- 
structions. In its broadest and most familiar 
term, this may be called " being a good sport M 
or "playing the game." 

94 



SUBLIMATION 

Archaic man knew nothing of this escape- 
ment — this other line of approach whereby 
victory might be wrested from the hands of 
defeat. Our remote ancestors, and some of 
their present-day descendants, if worsted in 
any test of strength and skill, mental or 
physical, immediately sought relief by be- 
littling the adversary. Our humiliated for- 
bear, who had been knocked down by an- 
other man, fought desperately to regain 
achievement and recognition by explaining 
that his own foot had slipped or that his 
opponent had resorted to unfair tactics. 
To-day a higher civilization has opened a 
new road whereby the defeated may turn 
his inferiority into supremacy. 

Present-day man, because of present-day 
standards, always has a line of escape open 
from the unendurable humiliation of defeat. 
He is beaten in a running race, a business 
deal, a Civil Service examination. He hears 
the cheers and sees the award bestowed on 
the victor. He himself can share in the 
cheers and gain a victory himself by holding 
out his hand to his conqueror and saying: 
"Congratulations, old man. I've been beaten 
by a better man than I." 

Through the games of childhood and 
youth civilization is trying to teach man this 
easier and better way of avoiding the pangs 

95 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

of humiliation. Colleges stress it in their 
tradition that their sons must "play the 
game like gentlemen." 

Archaic man, who girds and protests 
against defeat, is still with us. To him we 
owe a debt of gratitude. For him we still 
have a need. His is the bulldog determina- 
tion never to let go. He is the man who 
"never knows when he is licked." Without 
his unrelenting, adventurous spirit civiliza- 
tion would undoubtedly have advanced far 
more slowly than it has. Such "never-say- 
die" people are still with us. The spirit 
which drives them toward their single ob- 
jective, "to win," in not taking into account 
the possibility of loss does not — as we are 
apt to think — leave them just "open- 
mouthed," but throws them back to the 
Narcissistic period where the matter of loss 
— intolerable to mental life — may find its 
only outlet. Such a person is apt to say 
"the test was not a fair one! My adversary 
had advantages which I had not," etc. In 
sporting parlance he "alibis" himself. It is 
indeed man flying to the defense of his 
splendid self, but with pitiful preparation 
and result. 

Man's primitive attempt to snatch vic- 
tory from defeat is not so Archaic as those 

of his forbears who killed the person who 

96 



SUBLIMATION 

had humiliated him. The same motive also 
prompted little Joe of the dancing-school 
episode (related earlier) who sought to be- 
little the dancers by standing on his head. 

How are you and I and the remainder of 
the world to keep from this error ? How are 
we to avoid those mental cramps which if 
disregarded will result in violent manifesta- 
tions of the Anal-Erotic ? What is to be the 
mental equivalent of the pepsin and hydro- 
chloric acid which civilization now brings 
to the aid of similar physical conditions ? 

By Sublimation — that is, by laying down 
before we attempt our deed an alternative 
way of obtaining success, in case we are 
cheated out of it in our direct attack. In 
our conscious minds we must find, when 
faced by a situation threatening humiliation, 
an escapement that will satisfy us. 

Many of us have established formulas to 
this end without consciously recognizing the 
laws that lie behind them. Others in their 
daily life continually neglect to consider 
escapement. In consequence these are thrust, 
time after time, back into the Archaic to 
obtain a relief which they do not know how 
to wring from the present. 

Such a person was Sam, the gawky son of a 
widow who ran a summer boarding house in 
Jersey. His mother cherished an old blue- 

97 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

and-white Dutch pitcher that had been in 
the family for generations. One day she 
sent Sam down into the cellar to fill it with 
cream. Sam went down into the cellar, but 
not in the accepted fashion. He slipped on 
the top step and went thundering to' the 
bottom with a noise that shook the whole 
dwelling. His mother rushed to the door 
and cried: "Sam! Sam!" 

From the darkness below Sam returned a 
Spartan, "What, ma?" 

"Ye didn't break that there pitcher, did 
you, Sam?" 

"No," came the wrathful reply, "I didn't, 
but, by golly! I'm gonna." 

A second later a milder crash told that 
Sam, driven into the Archaic by injured 
dignity and lack of sympathy, had found his 
relief there. Had the outraged Sam known 
of the satisfaction that sublimation would 
bring, he might have replied, "No, ma; I 
saved your pitcher, but I'm afraid I have 
hurt myself pretty badly." For that he 
would have feasted his starving ego on 
gratitude and sympathy. 

What man has not felt a sudden rush of 
humiliation when his wife has appeared of a 
rainy morning, bearing his rubbers, wearing 
an exasperated expression and saying, "I'll 

put those down right beside you so you can't 

98 



SUBLIMATION 

possibly forget to put them on before you 
go out." 

In this, as in a thousand other little crises 
of domestic life, he may plunge his whole 
household back into the Archaic by grum- 
bling: "My dear, give me credit for a little 
intelligence. I'm not quite the damned 
fool you seem to think me." Or he may 
sublimate the demand of his ego and keep 
his home and his mind machine at peace by 
replying: "It was sweet of you to remember 
them. No wonder I forget when you are 
always looking out for my welfare." 

In his home, in the outside world, no mat- 
ter what crisis may face a man, he can, if he 
will, always turn it into a mental profit. 
That is no new discovery. Solomon had 
learned part of it thousands of years ago 
when he wrote, "A soft answer turneth away 
wrath." 

It is strange that he, coming of a race of 
excellent business men, did not also dwell 
on the personal profit that man may derive 
from sublimation. 



VIII 

THE PSYCHIC CENSOR 

THE mind of man as he is to-day is the 
mind of his most remote human an- 
cestor with the addition of numberless 
generations of alteration and development in 
accordance with the growth of his herd life — 
his civilization, which has replaced his purely 
individualistic primitive existence. 

Man is Adam, lifted by evolution into 
harmony with the twentieth century, as 
surely as the locomotive and the engines of 
the liner are the steaming kettle, elaborated 
and complicated. Whirring dynamos, pro- 
pellers, and driving wheels turning rapidly 
are but modern manifestations of the lifting 
kettle lid, pushed upward by the power of 
steam. Back of the delicate, enormously 
powerful engines of to-day lies the simple, 
tremendous primal force of the expansion of 
steam. 

Back of the mental processes of the mem- 
bers of our present generation are the bald, 
uncomplexed, Archaic lusts for food and 

ioo 



THE PSYCHIC CENSOR 

drink, for warmth, for sex gratification. 
They are the steam. Their elemental force 
is the primal drive behind all workings df the 
complex mind machine of the present day — 
a machine which the advancing civilization 
of the herd will complicate still further with 
each succeeding generation, even as the 
steam engine becomes more intricate and 
involved with each decade. 

Under the hand of man the evolution of 
the teakettle, to meet the demands and con- 
ditions of modern life, has resulted in the 
locomotive. Under the hand of the Great 
Mechanic, over a vast stretch of years, the 
mind of man has also changed and been 
elaborated to meet the demands and condi- 
tions of developing herd life. Yet behind 
the complicated, delicately adjusted mecha- 
nism of the locomotive is the primitive force 
of steam, and back of the complex mind 
machine of modern man is also a primal 
force — the three great lusts in all their 
Archaic manifestations, without which life 
cannot exist — To Live, To Achieve, To 
Propagate. 

The great problem that man has been called 
upon to solve in his struggle upward from 
the beast has been the harnessing and taming 
of these Archaic forces, inherited from one 
generation to the other in his unconscious 

IOI 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

mind. He has been forced to subjugate 
these bestial cravings and translate them to 
the best of his ability into terms conformable 
with the continually increasing requirements 
of herd life. 

Of themselves the three primal desires are 
things of terror and revulsion to the con- 
scious mind, educated and trained according 
to civilized standards. They are violent 
forces, even as the power of pent-up steam 
is of itself a violent force. 

Yet man has learned to bridle and control 
the terrible force of steam expansion, and by 
the development of certain mechanisms has 
translated its overwhelming brutal energy 
into something that accomplishes his will, 
turns the dynamos that furnish him with 
light and heat, drives the engines that enable 
him to speed over land and sea. 

So also has the explosive force of man's 
first hungers been tempered and restrained, 
through the mechanism of the modern mind 
machine of man, into a power that drives 
man forward to higher and more complex 
things than the bestially simple cravings for 
food, drink, and the opposite sex. 

But the expanding steam, after it has 
performed the work set for it by man, must 
find an outlet. We see the primitive force 
that lifted the kettle lid, escaping unchanged 

I02 



THE PSYCHIC CENSOR 

from stack and exhaust pipe. And the lusts 
that once held supreme and uncontested 
sway over man's mind must also have their 
escapement. The primal desires must be 
gratified to-day, just as they had to be a 
million years ago. In its advancement the 
mind of man has been faced with the problem 
of compressing the gratification of these 
desires into limits conformable with the 
growing demands of civilization. 

Let us see how man's mind machine has 
handled this problem. Deep- and fast- 
rooted in the unconscious divisions of the 
mind are the three primitive desires, uncon- 
querable, ineradicable. Their cry, "I want," 
cannot be neglected, cannot be passed over 
unheeded. 

But over against the stark earth clamor of 
the Archaic mind is set the conscious mind 
with its desire To Be Great inherited from 
the foreconscious mind, together with its 
experiences in civilized herd conduct. 

Here we have the two opposing forces — the 
Archaic, infinitely strong, dominating, un- 
beatable; and the desire To Be Great of the 
conscious mind, persistent and continually 
searching for achievement and recognition, 
in the herd. 

Were the Archaic allowed full rein in all 

the earthy aims of its desire, the search of 

103 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

civilized man for greatness at a high level 
never could be gratified, and without that 
quest civilized man would vanish from the 
earth. 

On the other hand, were the conscious 
mind to attain full sway and achieve the 
power of throttling and conquering the 
primal lusts, man could exist no more than 
a steam engine could run with the pipe to 
the steam boiler severed. 

Thus we have the two forces, interde- 
pendent, essential one to the other, and each 
wholly necessary to life and its advancement. 
How has the disaster been avoided that 
must follow a fight to the death of these 
two? 

By compromise. By arbitration. 

Only through the agency of the conscious 
mind can the drives of the Archaic be 
realized. The unconscious mind has no 
contact with the world of to-day save 
through its modern counterpart — the con- 
scious. But the conscious mind, with its 
desire for achievement and recognition upon 
which civilization is based, cannot permit the 
hoary lusts to appear in all their primal 
abhorrence. 

Hence the establishment of an arbitrator; 

a force capable of translating the cravings of 

the primitive into terms of the twentieth 

104 



THE PSYCHIC CENSOR 

century. Psychologists have recognized this 
force and have termed it the Psychic Censor. 

For the sake of clearness let us resort to 
pragmatism and regard this quality of the 
human mind, the censor, as though it were 
something more actual than a mere figure of 
speech. 

Psychology holds that it is the job of the 
censor to act as an arbitrator between the 
Archaic which man inherits and the stand- 
ards of present-day herd life to which we 
must submit, at least ostensibly. For the 
Archaic must find an outlet into the present. 
The primal lusts cannot be choked off while 
life continues, any more than one may shut 
off an engine and leave the fire blazing hotly 
beneath the boiler. 

But the censor modifies the expression of 
these lusts for food, for shelter, and, above 
all, for the opposite sex. It presents them 
to the world in terms acceptable by modern 
society. In other words, it disguises sex 
desire's hot brutality under the decorum of 
modern courtship. It transforms the hun- 
ger lust into the formality of meals at regular 
intervals. 

Thus, to the psychologist, every act, every 

thought of man is regarded from two 

angles and must be considered in connection 

with its manifest content — the conscious 
s 105 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

purpose possessed by the mind; and its 
latent content, the Archaic lust that lies 
behind. 

A rough formula for any act or thought of 
man would be: first, the Archaic craving; 
then the passage of this craving through the 
hands of the Psychic Censor into the con- 
scious mind; then the action of the con- 
scious mind timed and regulated in accord- 
ance with expedience — in accordance with 
its desire To Be Great and its place in the 
herd. 

Because of the Psychic Censor, because of 
the continual drive of the conscious mind 
toward achievement — in herd standards — 
the Archaic hunger is not recognized by the 
conscious mind and is therefore not filed 
away in the conscious memory glossary to 
which man is continually adding the result 
of his every conscious action for his own 
future guidance. 

The primal lust is concerned only with 
satisfaction, with satiation. Once gratified, 
it retires temporarily. On the other hand, 
the conscious mind is forever striving for 
more herd greatness. That is its continual 
aim, and each of its acts is listed away in 
memory, to form part of the store of informa- 
tion upon which man is continually drawing 

to help him to further greatness. 

106 



THE PSYCHIC CENSOR 

Anger, depression, hatred, horror dreams, 
various emotions and concepts that are 
manifestly unpleasant, are latently Archaic 
gratifications ; they are the attempts of the 
Psychic Censor to release through the con- 
scious mind some primal lust that must be 
gratified yet not appear before the world 
in its bare, revolting aspect. 

Freud has piled up enough evidence to 
show that dreams are actually an arbitra- 
tion between the two great contesting par- 
ties, the Archaic and the conscious. In 
dreams the two divisions of the mind, the 
Archaic crying the "I want" of immediate 
physical necessity; the conscious clamoring 
the "I want" of herd expedience — of the 
desire To Be Great — meet and establish a 
basis of agreement through which, working 
together, each may obtain its end. 

Freud has also shown that only one of these 
two "I want" cries registers in the conscious 
mind. The Archaic is concerned only with 
the immediate gratification of its hunger. 
It has nothing whatever to do with the 
future exploitations of man, discards the 
matter of future expediency, and therefore 
is not registered on the memory. 

It is exactly this unregistered, latent mate- 
rial for which the psychoanalyst searches. 

He knows that if he can dig down far enough 

107 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

through the strata of human minds he will 
find that the foundation of dreams and 
conscious actions are the immemorial 
lusts that were man's early cravings, and 
for which man in his herd life to-day has sup- 
plied many substitutions that satisfy these 
desires as well as did the early methods of 
gratification. 
Vx For instance, a man has a dispute with his 
wife. The argument becomes violent and 
terminates by his bursting from the room 
and slamming the door behind him. Tempo- 
rarily he has killed her. For a few minutes 
or hours she plays the part only of a slain 
woman in his life. She is dead to his 
physical necessity. The latent material be- 
hind his act is murder; yet since the Psychic 
Censor has learned that the Archaic needs 
only a certain space of time for the complete 
gratification of its desire, it has substituted 
the door slamming and the temporary ab- 
sence for the wielding of a weapon and the 
extinction of the wife. 

These substitutions employed by the cen- 
sor are, of course, dependent to a great ex- 
tent upon education and experience. These 
furnish the means whereby the Archaic 
drives reach the world in their least violent 
forms. Only a few centuries ago man had 

not collected sufficient knowledge to handle 

108 



THE PSYCHIC CENSOR 

the drive to kill harmlessly. When affronted, 
he took direct Archaic action and slew his 
traducer. 

It should also be remembered that in the 
present generation man, by lack of oppor- 
tunity, may be deprived of sufficient knowl- 
edge and experience to effect these substitu- 
tions, and perfectly normal Archaic acts, 
through want of proper handling by the 
Psychic Censor, become twentieth-century 
crimes. 



IX 



DREAMS 1 

FLINT AXE, of ten thousand years ago, 
baffled in the hunt, and unable to kill 
the successful hunter, crept morosely into 
his cave and slept. And as he slumbered, 
Nature sent him dreams that shook from the 
fire box of his primitive mind machine the 
clinkers of humiliation and self-disgust which 
were forcing his mental organism back into 
utter bestiality. 

In his vision he saw himself a victor, in 
some manner or other, over the man who 
was his physical superior. Flint Axe awoke 
refreshed and with the murder lust that 
had boiled inside him abated. Nature had 
stepped in and furnished the escapement 
which he himself had been unable to achieve 
consciously. 

In the dreams of Flint Axe, the mechanism 
of the Anal-Erotic functioned satisfactorily. 
In our dreams to-day the identical process is 
going on. Throughout the history of hu- 
manity Nature has used dreams as a safety 

no 



DREAMS 

valve and has employed them to govern 
and ease situations which conscious man is 
unable to do by himself. 

Dreams were man's first effort at subli- 
mation. "Desires gratified" was Freud's 
definition. In man's present civilization he 
is attempting only to follow consciously the 
method his foreconscious mind has em- 
ployed through all the ages of his develop- 
ment from the higher ape. 

In the simple life of the Archaic dreams 
began to permit man "to achieve" without 
killing his brother. In the more complicated 
existence of the present dreams have become 
so amplified that they furnish escapement 
from a thousand and one conditions which 
otherwise would become insupportable. 

From the beginning of civilization man 
has instinctively placed much significance 
in dreams. Seers and magicians have read 
them and have drawn tremendous portents 
and omens from them. To-day the psy- 
choanalyst reads and studies more scientifi- 
cally and draws from them conclusions more 
truthful and accurate, but little less dramatic, 
than did the necromancers of an earlier day. 

Man, psychologists have learned, always 
dreams true. But the psychologist in his 
method of searching out that truth travels 
in an opposite direction from the dream 

in 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

reader of earlier civilization. The seer 
sought some material future event of which 
the dream was the foreshadowing. The 
scientific dream interpreter of to-day also 
looks upon the dream as a shadow, but a 
shadow of something that has already trans- 
pired. He works backward through the 
vision to the past event or condition that 
has inspired it. 

Dreams are truth, but they are the truth 
of the past rather than of the future, save 
in their foreshadowing of future conduct 
through habit. They tell, with a definite 
symbolism, of a shock, a crisis, a hunger 
which the mind has confronted and of 
which it is now seeking to rid itself. 

A man is in business difficulties. He is 
hounded by his creditors. Each day brings 
to his waking life fresh humiliation, fresh 
starvation of his desire To Be Great. Pres- 
ently he begins to be afflicted with night- 
mares. He dreams, for instance, that he is 
pursued across a field by a mad bull. He 
wakes, panting and sweating with terror. 

His nightmare is merely his foreconscious 
self attempting to comfort him with the 
metaphor of dreams. A psychologist would 
translate this alarming vision into the fol- 
lowing message from the unconscious mind 
to the sleeping conscious: 

112 



DREAMS 

"Of course you are worried. Of course 
you are frightened and humiliated over the 
condition into which your business has 
fallen. But it isn't your fault. No one 
could help acting as you do under the cir- 
cumstances, any more than you could help 
running away from a mad bull. Anyone 
would do that." 

The elaborate metaphor and symbolism 
in which dreams are most frequently cast 
serves often to obscure their meaning from 
one whose mind is concerned with the ma- 
terial matter-of-fact affairs of waking life. 
The unconscious mind from which dreams 
spring is an older and less civilized organism 
than the conscious mind. As a result its 
messages are not given in the definite words 
of modern life. It resorts to the pictures 
and symbols which men of an earlier day 
used in place of the alphabet. Dreams bear 
the same relation to conscious thought of 
the Social era that the hieroglyphics of 
ancient Egypt do to the modern printed 
page. 

Of recent years mind mechanicians have 
discovered through extensive research and 
tabulation the psychic Rosetta Stone, which 
enables them to read the symbols and 
pictures of dreams. Dreams are sublima- 
tion ; yet because of the fact that they spring 

113 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

from our inheritance from earlier civilization, 
because they are limned by the age-old, 
unconscious mind, the sublimation is gener- 
ally at a low level. How high or low this 
level may be depends upon the Psychic 
Censor. 

From man to man, the Psychic Censor — 
whether he be what we loosely term soul 
or personality or character — varies as much as 
physiognomies. In some of us the censor 
will permit actions and thoughts which it 
denies to others. The speech and the mind 
action of a longshoreman differ from the 
word and thought of a delicately reared 
young girl only in so far as their individual 
censors vary in their rule of the mind 
machine. 

The three life essentials — to keep warm, 
to keep fed, and to breed — are at the root of 
all dreams, and since in present-day existence 
few humans are tortured by cold and hunger, 
the third impulse is the one that most fre- 
quently seeks in sleep gratification of the 
desire denied and often obscured during 
waking hours by the Psychic Censor's con- 
trol of the conscious mind. 

In dreams the unregenerate unconscious 

mind voices various cravings and strives and 

wrestles with the Psychic Censor for simple 

expression. The drive is there, but the 

114 



DREAMS 

censor cannot permit it to be expressed in all 
its revolting simplicity. The mind of civil- 
ized man will not endure the open expres- 
sion of this bald, primitive desire. Man has 
placed this behind doors in his mental life, 
as in his physical life he has segregated his 
bathroom and his bridal chamber. He rebels 
at having either the mental or actual doors 
forced open. 

Yet the unconscious mind in dreams is 
thundering at the portal which the Psychic 
Censor guards. How does the sentinel pro- 
tect it? And how does the unconscious get 
by? 

The unconscious mind resorts to symbol- 
ism. It will not seek to prevent the dream, 
but it will reclothe it gorgeously, so that it 
may masquerade through our dream life 
without being identified by the conscious 
Psychic Censor as the stark primitive thing 
that it is. 

The psychoanalyst, stripping the dream of 
the trappings in which it is draped to deceive 
the Psychic Censor, finds the primitive drive 
in all its nakedness. These drives, let me 
reiterate, are but three, and our present easy 
civilization is able almost invariably to 
gratify at least two of them in our waking 
hours. 

The man who dreams that he is fleeing 

us 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

from a wild bull is sublimating his failure 
To Be Great in the social or herd life. His 
business is not going well. He is threatened 
with misfortune. Yet why does this hu- 
miliate and worry him so that he is forced to 
seek escapement in his dreams ? If he fails 
in his herd life he will no longer be able to 
achieve those things which he cannot do 
without — warmth, food, and sex gratification. 

A patient came to me recently and related 
a dream that was an almost perfect example 
of the sublimation of the failure To Be 
Great, and was extraordinarily rich in the 
symbolism which the Psychic Censor had 
used to cover up and transform the ugliness 
of the basic drive. 

He dreamed, he said, that he was riding 
along a highway in an automobile, searching 
for the treasurer of the company of which 
he was president. Here we have the first 
important symbol — the officer of his com- 
pany, whom he cannot find. This is sig- 
nificant of business difficulty. 

Finally, he continued, he came to an un- 
frequented lane branching off at the left of 
the road. It was grass-grown and barred 
by an ancient gate. It led to an old house 
behind which rose a forest. He stopped 
his automobile, alighted, climbed the gate, 

and started up the lane to the house. Mark 

116 



DREAMS 

once more the symbolism. He has left the 
highway, a natural and legal road of travel, 
and is now pursuing his course no longer on 
the proper road, but through unfrequented 
and private grounds. This is specially sig- 
nificant when coupled with the earlier symbol 
of business difficulty. 

He finally reached the house, which was 
brilliantly lighted, and through its windows 
saw that it was filled ''with pirates, beauti- 
fully dressed, with turbans and sashes of 
brilliant hues. They were dancing to music 
and having a gay time." He laid great 
stress upon the words I have quoted. They 
spoke clearly of his love of beauty, self- 
adornment, pleasure. Even if those who 
possessed these things were pirates he envied 
them. 

After watching the pirates with fascina- 
tion and delight he knocked on the door. 
A hugh pirate opened it. 

"I am looking for the treasurer of our 
company," said the dreamer. 

"Oh, we've got him," replied the pirate. 
"Won't you come in and join us?" 

He entered. "Then a curious thing hap- 
pened. I was led over to the table where a 
bowl that contained what seemed to be oil 
stood beside the lamp. The pirate lifted 

my coat and shirt and bared my skin. He 

117 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

dipped his fingers in the oil and passed them 
about my loins. My legs collapsed — folded 
up beneath me. I could do nothing." 

Here I interrupted him by saying, "And 
so the pirates had you, too!" 

He started and looked dazed, as though he 
had just awakened. I could not get him to 
relate the rest of his dream. Nor was he 
inclined to discuss it at all, pretending that 
it was a trivial matter. Here again notice 
the accuracy of the symbolism used by the 
"dream artist," as Freud calls him. The 
pirates, whose luxury and gayety he had 
admired, had got him, but through no fault 
of his own. The oil with its smoothness is 
symbolic of blameless innocence on the part 
of the dreamer. The anointing of his loins 
— from which, since the beginning of time, 
it has been said that one's family springs — 
and the subsequent collapse of his legs is 
emblematic of an attack upon his family 
and the sacrifice he is making for their 
preservation. 

The dream artist wastes no stroke of his 
brush, no drop of pigment. He paints in his 
dream allegory nothing that does not spring 
from a definite and actual source in life itself. 

In telling me his dream my patient said as 

plainly as though he had uttered it in blunt 

words : 

118 



DREAMS 

"Because of my love of something which 
I could not attain legally I have violated 
established law. As a result I am in grievous 
difficulty/' 

This, I may add, subsequent events proved 
to be true. That, then, was the foundation 
of his dream. How did he sublimate it ? 

Remember the oil and the paralysis which 
followed, in the dream, the anointing of his 
loins. 

"See/' the man said in his dream, "what 
has happened has not been my fault. I have 
been utterly helpless. Why? Because I 
have been trying to protect my family which 
sprang from my loins. The trouble that 
now besets me is not my fault. I have 
sacrificed myself for my family. Higher 
than that man may not go." 

And having by sublimation justified his 
action in his dream he woke refreshed. 

Digging down through the strata of the 
dream we find at its bottom one of the three 
primal drives of life. Because the dreamer 
belongs to the world of civilization where 
warmth and food are plentiful we know 
almost before we start what we shall 
unearth. 

We see it faintly in the reference to his 

loins, but more clearly in our interpretation 

of that reference as applying to his family. 

119 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

What lies below that? Bare, stark sex 
gratification. 

In the constantly recurring nightmares of 
a patient of mine I have found quite clearly 
the latent content which the manifest denies 
most emphatically. The dreamer is an in- 
telligent, highly educated man, a writer of 
no small ability, and an executive of high 
standing. He is pursued by nightmares 
that his home has been destroyed by fire or 
that his automobile has been wrecked upon 
the highway. 

Neither of these catastrophes is the re- 
flection of any conscious wish. The dreams 
themselves contain no grudge against either 
the automobile or the house. It is simply 
that the social use of these things is failing 
to serve the Archaic side of his nature. 
Neither of them is aiding him in the attain- 
ment of the third of the hungers of his un- 
conscious mind, which obtains some satis- 
faction by destroying in dreams the things 
that avail not in his waking hours. 

In dealing with the matter of dreams the 
psychoanalyst must travel back through 
the twilight of remote and sordid life, deep 
down to the muck heap of Archaic appetite. 
All psychoanalysis must go through this 
channel and finally grub about in this muck 
heap to search out the latent drive of 

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DREAMS 

necessity. In the backward search there 
are way stations before one reaches the 
final depth. These serve to give us an 
understanding of the formulae upon which 
life is devised and which quite clearly point 
out the way of unbending Nature. 

The simple dream of a patient of mine will 
serve not only to point out the manifest 
material of the dream — the twentieth-cen- 
tury station — but also the latent materials 
which, dot the way and finally reach the 
darkness and slime of our beginning. 

This patient is a married woman of wealth 
and social standing. At the expressed de- 
sire of her husband, who saw in her childless 
life little or no opportunity for self-develop- 
ment, she took up a business career. In the 
course of time her husband became ill and 
for almost a year was seriously invalided. 
The relation of the above facts is necessary 
to the interpretation of the dream, since they 
show that the only Archaic food of which 
she suffered a lack was sex gratification. 

She dreamed that while crossing the 
street she was knocked down by a large, red 
automobile which ran over her, crushing both 
her legs. She was carried into her own 
home and put to bed in her own room. 
There she lay in her own bed, shut in by the 
four walls of her chamber. She remembered 

9 121 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

how satisfied and contented she was. The 
paper upon the walls was most harmonious 
and agreeable to look upon. The crushed legs 
gave her neither pain nor regret. She was 
quite satisfied with her lot. 

The manifest "I want" of this dream is 
quite clear. She was tired of work. She 
wanted to remain at home. The Psychic 
Censor has seen to it here that no law of 
herd life has been interfered with. The fact 
that she remained at home because her legs 
were crushed does not belie the purpose of 
civilization which begins with co-operation 
in another's wishes. This, then, is the first 
station in our journey back into the past. 

But the injury took place while crossing 
the street. Let this mark the starting point 
of the second stage of our journey. This in- 
dicates a change in the conduct of her life. 
She must cross to the other side of the street. 
And why not? Her husband is an invalid. 
She must herself attend from now on to 
things that were hitherto left entirely to 
him. With this the Psychic Censor can 
find no fault, either. Then came the crash. 

We have progressed far toward first 
principles, for in asking my patient why she 
saw the machine that knocked her down as 
red instead of blue or black or green she lost 
all her former willingness to co-operate and 

122 



DREAMS 

became impatient, even angry. Clearly, 
here was something which the Psychic 
Censor was having some difficulty in han- 
dling. We have passed the outposts of 
civilization. 

Why knocked down? Why legs? Why 
such joy and satisfaction in going to bed? 
And why all the excitement, the rapid heart- 
beats, the quickened respiration of which she 
told while relating the dream incident? 
The Psychic Censor denies all concurrence 
in the affair. My patient becomes angry 
and finally exclaims, "That may all be so, 
but why delve into the slums of the past, 
since we are well out of them ?" 

"Madam," I replied, "we no longer kill 
our meat in public, but have we discarded 
or even refined the process of slaughtering? 
Are we really so well out of it, after all? 
To man in his very earliest make-up sex 
hunger was to him as natural as his appetites 
for food and water. He took them because 
he needed them. The elaboration of them 
into life and conduct was no affair of Archaic 
man, for he had no conscious mind." 

Only the physician and the psychologist 
realize the strength of that dark current 
that runs, irresistible, yet hidden, through 
the life of humanity. To the average man 

or woman, appreciation of its force and the 

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GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

responsibility it bears for many of what we 
call our highest impulse would be a bitter 
and tremendous shock. 

The psychologist, human himself, recog- 
nizes but does not judge. His is the labor 
of delving to the foundations of thought 
and then laying what he has found before 
the world, without condemnation, without 
apology. To those who shrink and shudder 
at his findings he says : 

"'He that is without sin among you, let 
him, first, cast a stone.' " 

He knows full well that the missile flung 
will come from the hand of a conscious or 
unconscious hypocrite. 



X 



DREAMS — II 

THIS is the story of a woman who became 
a horse, who was transformed in the 
flash of one second from a middle-aged, dis- 
couraged little dressmaker into a neighing, 
snorting, prancing animal — a horse embodied 
in human form. 

It is a true tale, every word of it. To this 
I can testify, for she was my patient. For 
over a year I worked with the horse-woman. 
For months I fought that animal obsession 
that had assumed control of her mind ma- 
chine. And eventually I witnessed its death 
and watched the conscious mind struggle 
back to the place that was rightfully its own. 
The whinnying, pawing thing that galloped 
about the room, that snorted at its food, that 
tossed its head and rolled its eyes in as 
perfect an imitation of a horse as the human 
body could achieve, is to-day a middle-aged 
little dressmaker again. She is quite as sane 
as those persons who examined her a few 

years ago and dismissed a condition they did 

125 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

not understand with the verdict that she 
was "crazy." 

Here, at the beginning, let me pause and 
reiterate the inviolable laws that lie at the 
bottom of all human action — the great 
Three Commandments of Nature that no 
man can break and live. 

I. Live; keep the body fed, keep it warm. 

II. Achieve; attain success; follow the 
To-Be-Great desire. 

III. Propagate; perpetuate yourself ; grat- 
ify the sex impulse. 

These are the primal laws of life that man 
must fulfill. These are the things that 
Nature demands of every human. How he 
answers them rests with himself. They 
must find outlet and expression in some form. 

If they do not receive full recognition in 
man's waking life, they seek escapement in 
dreams. If the demand becomes too great 
and violent for dreams to handle or sublima- 
tion to attend to, something has to give way. 
The flood becomes so high that the dam 
breaks. 

Keep in mind also one other psychological 

law: man follows what he believes to be the 

most successful way of obtaining life's three 

great fundamentals — existence, achievement, 

sex gratification. Through experience he 

evolves formulas which he employs to that 

126 



DREAMS 

end. In other words, man is what he is 
because he finds that so being pays him best. 

These are the motives upon which the case 
of the horse-woman was built — obedience to 
Nature's Three Commandments and the 
evolution of a formula through which they 
can be followed most successfully. 

The woman who became a horse was born 
on a farm. There she spent her childhood. 
Her father died and her mother married 
again. When she became older the girl 
turned her energies to dressmaking. She 
was deft with her needle and possessed a 
knack of designing and embroidering shirt- 
waists that brought her in a competence from 
the people of the near-by village and, equally 
important, much praise for the quality of 
her work. 

"Mary," her neighbors told her, "I de- 
clare it's plain wonderful what you can do 
with a needle. Child, you shouldn't bury 
yourself on a farm all your life. You ought 
to go to the city and make a heap of money. 
Indeed you ought!" 

Here in the little country community 
Mary was keeping her body fed and warm. 
She was achieving. Yet the call of the city 
sounded in her ears. She wanted more, and 
her friends who admired her work assured 

her that she could get more in town. 

127 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

She came to New York into an atmosphere 
as different from the quiet friendly life of her 
little village as a bank lobby is from a fire- 
side. She took a bleak room high up in a 
cheap lodging house. Then she went forth 
with high hopes to conquer New York as 
she had conquered her own home. 

She went the dreary round of department 
stores and got a few orders for shirtwaists. 
She also obtained some private customers 
and did work for them. 

Her fellow lodgers watched her day by day 
going out and coming in, but with the innate 
aloofness of New Yorkers they said little to 
her. Week by week she grew thinner and 
paler and a desperate look came to be 
stamped on the face of Mary, whose work 
had been acclaimed by the friendly in- 
habitants of a little up-state town. 

Then one day a terrific noise came from the 
room of her whom the other lodgers had 
grown to know for her mouselike quiet. 
There was a thumping and a crashing and the 
sound of neighing and something galloping 
to and fro. Those who peered in slammed 
the door and then ran, white of face, for the 
police. For Mary, the demure, the sober, 
was cantering madly about, knocking over 
chairs and bric-a-brac, snorting, kicking, and 

prancing. 

128 



DREAMS 

A policeman overpowered her and said 
she was "crazy." An ambulance surgeon 
examined her and said she was "crazy." 
She was taken to a city hospital, where other 
surgeons put her in the psychopathic ward, 
saying she was "crazy." 

A week or so later a colleague laughed at me 
when I happened to remark, in the course of a 
conversation upon psychoanalysis, that a 
man was what he was because it paid him 
best. 

"Nonsense!" said my friend. "Why, I 
know of a woman who thinks she is a horse. 
Day and night she is nothing else. How can 
you explain that?" 

"Her brain may be affected," I answered. 
"Is there a lesion somewhere?" 

"None whatever," was his reply. "She 
is somewhat anaemic from undernourishment, 
but otherwise there is absolutely nothing 
wrong with her physically. Yet she insists 
on playing that she is a horse. I suppose," 
he added with a laugh, "you would claim 
she does that because it pays her best." 

" I should like to see her and get her history 
before answering that," I responded. 

A day or so later I saw the horse-woman 

for the first time. She was grotesque, yet 

there was something impressive about the 

manner in which she walked, trotted, gal- 

129 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

loped about the room, tossed her head, shied 
off when anyone approached. A violently 
imaginative person might have said that the 
soul of a horse had entered her body. 

"Well," queried the physicians who ac- 
companied me after I had watched her for a 
few minutes, "what's your diagnosis?" 

"I have none, yet," I answered, "except 
for this — she is not insane. If you will 
notice, she is giving a most realistic imitation 
of a horse. There is nothing incongruous 
about it. She is horse-perfect. If her brain 
were injured she could not be. She is not 
only not ' crazy/ but she is a person with a 
well-developed observational mind pretend- 
ing for some reason that she is a horse." 

In the next few days, by letter and personal 
inquiry, I had learned enough of the horse- 
woman's past history to be able to plot out 
the forces that worked together to bring 
about the climax which occurred when her 
fellow lodgers discovered her cantering and 
neighing about her room. 

Save for its final chapter it was an not 
unusual story. It was the well-worn tale of 
the man or woman, great in his or her own 
little circle, who broke away to become 
great in New York. 

Mary had slowly starved, physically and 

mentally. Her anaemic condition was proof 

130 



DREAMS 

that her body had not received the food it 
needed. Her transformation into a horse 
was no less proof that her mind had been 
denied what it required. 

She had no friends in the city. She had 
no money to buy friends or recreation. The 
shirtwaists that she sold to stores and to 
private customers did not bring in enough 
money for her to live comfortably, and they 
supplied none of the mental food which her 
mind required. 

In the little village where she had grown 
up each of her new creations was received 
with exclamations of delight and praise by 
the person for whom it was made. The 
shirtwaists she sold to stores brought in no 
such return. If they were not what the buyer 
wanted there was complaint. If they were 
satisfactory she got her money, but no mental 
pay in words of thanks and appreciation. 

With her private customers it was no bet- 
ter. Here when she delivered her creations 
a wooden-faced butler met her at the door, 
took the bundle, and, after remarking, 
"Madame will send you a check," slammed 
it in her face. Sometimes the check was 
forthcoming. Sometimes it wasn't. So 
Mary, the great dressmaker of a little town, 
was robbed of all her greatness in the city. 

" Live !" Nature commanded. " Keep your 

131 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

body fed and warmed. Achieve; attain 
success; feed the To-Be-Great desire/' 

She had not sufficient money to obey the 
first mandate. She could get none of the 
material of praise and appreciation to fpllow 
the second. 

Dreams through their sublimation did 
what they could to furnish her relief, but the 
drive was too big for all of its force to be 
carried off by this escapement. It accu- 
mulated from day to day and finally some- 
thing gave way. Something snapped. 

"Something snapped" — that is the best 
explanation that science can give a phe- 
nomenon that occurs from time to time 
in an overtaxed mind. Under certain con- 
ditions, when the mental mechanism is 
operating under a tremendous strain, there 
comes an instant when the conscious is dis- 
connected and scrapped and the unconscious 
assumes control. "Something snaps." The 
expression is indefinite and entirely prag- 
matic, but it is based on the observation of 
thousands of cases. 

For Mary, life could not be made to pay 
at the reasoning level. The formula which 
she followed to obtain life, achievement, and 
sex gratification — the three fundamentals — 
had proved false. She found herself in the 

same condition as the Prodigal Son before he 

132 



DREAMS 

rose and went to his father. And since like 
conditions produce similar reactions on the 
mind machine, the woman probably said to 
herself many times, "Why, the horses in 
my stepfather's stable are much better off 
than I am!" 

Then the snap came. She laid down the 
reasoning life from which she had been un- 
able to gain sufficient mental and physical 
food. She became a horse. And a horse 
she remained for many months. Why not? 
As a horse she got plenty of food. As a 
reasoning human she had not been able to 
get that. As a horse she attained recogni- 
tion; she achieved attention. She had been 
robbed of that food, too, in the life she had 
discarded. So she snorted and galloped 
and acted perfectly the part of a horse, while 
men called her "crazy" because she had 
chosen the quickest and easiest way to get 
what she had been starving for. 

A friend and patient of mine, a man of 
wealth, became interested in her case. At 
my instance he had her removed from the 
hospital to a quiet sanitarium in West- 
chester. There conditions that surrounded 
her were pleasanter and better than they 
had been in the city institution. But being 
a horse had obtained this for her, and a horse 
she remained. 

i33 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Almost daily I visited her. I sat and 
talked to her quietly while she whinnied and 
cantered about the room, never once violating 
her characterization. She gobbled her food 
like a horse. She never used her hands as any- 
thing but hoofs. She remained horse-perfect. 

She became a human again because the 
collie dog of my brother, who lived not far 
from the sanitarium, presented him with a 
litter of puppies. This gave into my hand 
material with which I might work effectively. 

The horse-woman was getting food and 
warmth. She was obeying the first of 
Nature's Three Commandments. She was 
achieving and obtaining recognition, thus 
fulfilling the second. It must, therefore, be 
by the force of the third, and that alone, that 
her regeneration could be accomplished. 

Sex desire and mother instinct are closely 
interwoven. By the fluffy, solemn-faced col- 
lie pups I hoped to appeal to the latter and 
drive her back to the life of reason by 
breaking through the horse impersonation 
which she followed so perfectly. 

One morning I appeared at her room with 
the four fat balls of fluff squalling and 
tumbling over one another in a large market 
basket. I did not show them to her or call 
her attention to them in any way. I placed 
the basket by my chair and began my usual 

i34 



DREAMS 

chat with her. It was really a monologue 
delivered without any encouragement what- 
ever from her. She continued to snort and 
trot about the room. Once or twice, when 
the puppies yapped or whined, I caught her 
rolling her eyes toward them, but she still 
remained a horse. 

On my next visit I brought the pups again. 
This time while talking I reached into the 
basket, drew one of them out, and patted it 
while continuing my conversation. Again 
I saw her watch them, but I made no attempt 
to show them to her nor did I refer to them 
in my talk. 

This went on for a week or more. Then 
came the great day, the day on which the 
mother instinct, the sex drive of the Archaic, 
broke the horse impersonation. 

Still talking, I rose, left the collies in their 
basket at my chairside, and began to stroll 
about the room. The horse-woman sniffed 
suspiciously and edged away, but I took 
no notice of that and continued to wander 
about, looking from the window, gazing at 
the pictures on the walls. As much as 
possible I kept my back toward the basket 
where the puppies were tumbling over one 
another. It was hard to talk calmly and 
indifferently when I saw that she was watch- 
ing them and edging near them. 

135 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

I sauntered to the far end of the room and 
pretended to be greatly interested in a 
picture that hung there. Mirrored in its 
glass I could see the puppy basket and the 
horse-woman inching up toward it. Pres- 
ently she stood beside it, watching the allur- 
ing pups, and now and again darting a glance 
at me to see if I were observing her. I con- 
tinued to talk and look at the picture. 

One of the yellow balls of down rose on 
his unsteady legs and whined appealingly 
at the horse-woman standing above him. 
Breathlessly I watched a hand creep down 
and furtively fondle his soft coat. 

I knew at that moment a hoof had dropped 
away from that hand and we had won! 

Within a week the quickened mother in- 
stinct had so far subdued the horse imperson- 
ation that she, who had been Mary the 
dressmaker and would be again, was able to 
sit with the puppies clambering about in her 
lap while I talked to her. 

We had subdued the obsession. The work 

now was to bring her wholly back to the 

life of reason and to make that existence 

pay at a reasoning level. I urged her to sew, 

and within a few weeks the hands that had 

been hoofs for a year were plying a needle 

and thread again. I ordered shirtwaists 

from her and I paid her well for them. 

136 



DREAMS 

Horrible, nightmare things they were at 
first, without any form and with stitching 
wide and irregular, yet, thanks to the aid of 
my friend, we bought everything she made. 
She saved her money, and as she watched it 
grow she reached out and took a firmer 
hold on rational life. Presently she began 
to buy things with it — delicacies and flowers, 
and eventually material for more shirtwaists. 

As her mind returned to reason so did the 
work of her hands. At the end of two years 
all of her old skill had come back. We saw 
to it that she obtained a market for every- 
thing she made. We praised her work and 
told her what a wonderful person she was. 

For the first time since she left her home 
to come to the city her old formula of 
life was returning enough food, heat, and 
achievement to satisfy her. Daily she held 
more firmly to it. 

She is back in her home now, where she 
enjoys the reputation of being the best 
dressmaker in the county. A staid and prim 
and respectable person is Mary. If you 
were to tell her the storv of the woman who 
became a horse to get what she needed out 
of life she would be sure that woman had 
been crazy and would rather suspect that 
you, who told about her, were also demented. 

10 



XI 

PSYCHOPATHIC AND PSYCHOPHYSICAL 

A MILLION years ago Nature drove a 
collective bargain with all mankind. 
Upon the shoulders of each of us at birth is 
placed the responsibility of fulfilling through- 
out existence our individual shares in that 
contract. 

"I will give you life," the stern old mother 
of us all has said to humanity, " but in return 
for my gift you must spend your days in 
achieving three things without which you 
cannot continue existence — Food, Sex Grati- 
fication, Recognition and Success." 

So man goes about the world, endlessly 
bargaining and trading for the satisfaction of 
these three demands. Normally, and if his 
environment is suitable to his normality, 
his conscious mind controls his bartering. 

But the conscious mind is not always a far- 
seeing, resourceful purchaser. Time after 
time it drives unfortunate man into a bargain 
from which he finds he cannot realize food 
to supply Nature's triple command. Trapped 

138 



PSYCHOPATHIC 

by the lack of foresight, his conscious mind 
is faced with an unendurable condition. He 
must fight his way out of the ambuscade into 
which he has fallen. 

He turns for aid in the battle that is before 
him, not to the conscious, but the uncon- 
scious mind — his Archaic self — and the old 
Adam that slumbers in all of us girds up his 
loins for war. Consciously man has sold 
his birthright for a mess of pottage. This 
the Archaic will not have. Straightway he 
repudiates that sale and attempts from his 
own inherited knowledge to fulfill man's 
bargain with Nature. 

But the Archaic will work only with 
material in which it has had experience. It 
will get for man the three things he needs, 
but will obtain them in all probability at a 
level far below that of present-day standards 
of life. 

Through direction of the Archaic a psy- 
chopathic condition, such as overcame the 
horse-woman, may develop. Or a formula 
for existence may be laid down that will bring 
a result at a higher level, but yet may de- 
velop into what science now terms a psy- 
choneurosis. 

It was not many years ago that all the 
world looked indifferently upon persons who 
were struggling with the aid of the Archaic 

i39 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

to free themselves from an impossible bar- 
gain and termed them all "crazy." Because 
their thoughts and actions did not har- 
monize with modern standards, society re- 
fused to recognize them as normal units in the 
scheme of things. They were eliminated and 
shut away in asylums — dumped into the 
ash barrel. 

The attitude of the world in general has 
changed but little. The average man to-day 
dismisses the words and actions of his 
brother which he does not understand with 
a shrug of the shoulders and the remark: 
"Aw, he's crazy! He's a regular nut." 
Yet the "crazy" man and his judge are 
working for precisely the same three ends 
toward which all life struggles, and the 
procedure of the "nut" may be much more 
logical and effective than that of his scornful 
denouncer. 

Lately, however, science has adopted a 
more charitable spirit toward the men and 
women whom it formerly dumped into the 
ash barrel. Science is beginning to go over 
the contents of this receptacle, and to find 
there many cast-offs, heretofore decreed 
useless, which only need readjustment and 
a better opportunity to satisfy the desires 
for food and warmth, sex gratification, and 

To Be Great. When these were accom- 

140 



PSYCHOPATHIC 

plished the "crazy" people were crazy no 
longer. They reassumed the responsibilities 
of life with their conscious minds, abandoned 
the directions of the Archaic and became 
normal men and women again. 

That work of rehabilitation, begun so re- 
cently, is extending rapidly. Science has 
learned that the man who thinks he is 
Napoleon Bonaparte may not be insane at 
all, but merely a psychopathic case in which 
the Archaic has resorted to radical measures 
to obtain what life must have. 

The man or woman who becomes erratic 
and abnormal in a certain environment may 
be merely a "Psychophysical case" (Fech- 
ner's law). The peculiar composition of the 
body may be such that it cannot endure the 
climate into which it is thrust. Unable to 
obtain the three great needs under these 
conditions, the Archaic has begun to clamor 
for change. 

Again, a person who is weighted down by 
some special obsession may be only a victim 
of a formula laid down by the Archaic early 
in life and followed slavishly through it 
because it always supplied Nature's Three 
Commandments. In other words, he or she 
may be suffering from a " Psychoneurosis." 

A few years ago I was standing on the 

porch of a big summer hotel when a man who 

141 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

had been pacing up and down for a half 
hour mopping his face nervously and looking 
eagerly down the driveway, rushed up to me 
and blurted : 

"Doctor, they tell me you are both 
a psychologist and a practicing physician. 
For God's sake do something for me. I can't 
stand this much longer ! " He then explained 
that each day his wife was accustomed to 
go out during the afternoon in his auto- 
mobile. "If she doesn't get back on time," 
he said, "I suffer the agony of the damned. 
I see her lying dead or injured somewhere 
along the road. My imagination tortures 
me until I feel that I can't stand it longer 
without losing my mind." 

He was so agitated that I did not express 
the first thought that came to my mind — 
that he had assumed this attitude because 
he had found somewhere in his past that it 
had paid. He sat beside me and we chatted 
for a few minutes. 

What did he think of conditions in Wall 

Street? Oh, they were in a fearful state! 

The whole financial structure seemed to be 

crumbling. Everything was going to wrack 

and ruin. And the country in general? 

(This was before we joined in the war upon 

Germany.) Deplorable. We were drifting 

into a disastrous conflict. Germany was too 

142 



PSYCHOPATHIC 

strong. She would conquer first Europe and 
then us. As for the asininity of the present 
administration — 

So his conversation ran, always in the most 
pessimistic tone, always with an apparent 
effort to voice the worst thing possible that 
could transpire in any situation. Again he 
returned to his wife and the obsession that 
gripped him when she went off in their car in 
the afternoon. It was now five-thirty, he 
said, with an obvious attempt to control his 
voice. She had said that she would be back 
by four. Perhaps she — 

Here I interrupted him. "I am going to 
give you your life history," I said, "a his- 
tory of area, rather than spot, truth. I am 
going to try to diagnose the conditions which 
you were bound to face as a boy. 

"The money-maker in your family when 
you were a child — presumably your father — 
was unable, for some reason — any reason — 
to cope successfully with life. As a result 
there was great distress in your family while 
you were very young. You felt this, but 
were unable to help ease the condition. 
As you became old enough to make a little 
money for yourself the pinch continued. 
You worked hard and gave all that you 
earned to hold your family together. From 
your earliest childhood on you were obliged 

i43 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

to look ahead for trouble in order to avoid it. 
There was always plenty for you to look 
forward to. As a result you became a 
specialist in looking for trouble and dodging 
it. The habit formed by your unconscious 
mind to help you get the things you needed 
for life clung to you as you grew older. 
I can see that you are well off, but I'll wager 
that you have never given much thought as 
to whether you are a rich man or poor. 
Your chief aim in life has been to look for- 
ward and prepare yourself for the coming 
misfortune. As a result money has come to 
you, but it has rolled in behind you only 
half observed. You have built up a psycho- 
neurosis which forces you to look upon the 
darker side of every question." 

He looked startled and then smiled. 
"Yes," he admitted, "I confess that you have 
hit it about right. It is true that my father 
was unable to support his family. He died 
and I was called on to help hold things to- 
gether when I was only a little boy. I sup- 
pose that is what is the trouble. But my 
wife isn't home yet — " 

"Friend," I replied, "many times now, 

possibly hundreds of times, you have watched 

your wife go off in your car. Each time you 

have bet yourself that she wouldn't come 

back. Each of these hundreds of times you 

144 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL 

have lost. Is it intelligent to keep playing 
this system any longer? Why not bet the 
other way for a change and win sometimes ?" 

He smiled again and looked relieved. "That 
is a good idea/' he said. "I'll try it/ 5 

In the horse-woman of the last chapter 
and the man whose conversation I have 
recorded above we have examples of two 
classes into which science has grouped those 
once called "crazy" — the psychopathic, 
whose mind has become completely under the 
sway of the Archaic so that to all outward 
appearances she is insane, although there is 
no lesion to explain the insanity, and the 
psychoneurotic, who, because of some ex- 
perience in his past, has been unable to shake 
off the influence of the formula adopted at 
that time by his unconscious mind. 

There still remains the third group : those 
whose normal lives are beclouded and al- 
tered because of the cry of the Archaic 
against some bodily discomfort or accident. 
This is the psychophysical. 

Up from the unplumbed pit of First 
Things the body and mind of man have 
journeyed together. They have advanced 
side by side. They have evolved, changed 
in shape and mechanism, become specialized 
in unison. They are bound together, inter- 
woven, entangled inextricably. 

i4S 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

From the first breath of a living thing body 
and mind work side by side. The chick 
upon hatching scratches for a living. Why ? 
Partly because of inherited knowledge, but 
also because the shape of the body fits it 
for no other method of procedure. The 
baby turns naturally to the mother's breast 
and suckles, impelled by the same drives of 
body and mind. 

Through all existence the close association 
of mind and body continues. In its house of 
living tissue the mind dwells, a jealous tenant. 
No alteration can be made upon its habita- 
tion, whether by accident, the surgeon's knife, 
or an oppressive climate, without exercising 
a direct effect on its inhabitant. 

A man of twenty-five is blinded in battle 
and immediately a terrific psychic change 
takes place. He loses a leg or an arm and 
there is an alteration of his point of view. 
His attitude toward the world of reality 
must change or he will die for lack of the 
three great needs. A pronounced blond is 
set down in a tropical climate; again a 
physical and mental overturning result. 

These things are facts, and upon a founda- 
tion of a vast multitude of such facts science 
has established its pragmatic warrant that 
shape and color are bound to affect man's 

psychic holdings. 

146 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL 

From this broad general ruling finer and 
more significant laws have been deduced. 
Shape, we have seen, partly controls the 
destiny of the chick and the baby. 

Science has developed this discovery much 
farther. Divergencies in shape among men 
themselves, it says, even variations in their 
color — the amount of pigmentation in their 
skins, hair, and eyes — have a distinct psychic 
bearing on their attitude toward their en- 
vironments and their world of reality. 

In fathoming the psychophysical laws set 
forth below psychology has joined hands 
with anthropology and ethnology and has 
also drawn some of its conclusions from the 
advanced practice of surgery and medicine. 

Through the general use of the X ray 
science discovered why it was that white 
men living in the tropics suffered from 
physical and mental deterioration. England 
learned early in the history of her world 
empire that white troops could remain 
in India only a certain time before their 
morale gave way under the climatic condi- 
tions encountered there. Why? 

The X ray answered. Its development 
had not progressed far before men learned 
that it could inflict terrific damage upon the 
human body, not only externally, but in- 
ternally. That was the first step. 

H7 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Later it was found that blond persons — 
those with little pigmentation in their skins — 
were injured more easily by the penetrating 
actinic ray — the so-called X ray — than were 
their brothers of a more swarthy complexion. 
Clearly, then, the pigmentation of the human 
body served to guard against the injurious 
effects of the X ray. 

The southern races, in their development, 
had built up in their own bodies a protection 
against those rays. Since their climatic and 
geographical location made no provision for 
the resisting or diffusing of the actinic sun ray, 
Nature had provided each individual with 
a resisting or diffusing mechanism of his own 
— his swarthy skin, his " mellonotic ,; gift. 
On the other hand, the northern races had 
evolved without need of excessive pigmenta- 
tion. The cloud banks, made up by the 
great seaway moistures, supplied the means 
for resisting and diffusing this actinic ray. 
They were blonds. But when transported 
to a tropic clime the actinic rays tore through 
the unguarded tissue and in a short time made 
further existence there unendurable. 

I recollect finding in a little Arizona town 

a big Swede who had been sent to that arid 

region in the hope that he might be able 

to shake himself free from tuberculosis. 

People in the town said that he had gone 

148 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL 

crazy. All day long he would lie on the 
porch of his shack, inert and apparently 
suffering. To all questions and suggestions 
he returned one answer: 

"I want to lie out in the rain!" 

Here was a man who consciously knew 
nothing of the effect of the fierce sun rays 
upon his unprotected blond self. His Ar- 
chaic mind had come to the rescue to the 
best of its ability and had succeeded in voic- 
ing the desire of his body. But no one 
understood, not even himself. 

His condition was purely psychophysical 
— color here was affecting his psychic hold- 
ings and his attitude toward the world of 
reality. 

Eventually I had him removed to upper 
California where the moist cloud banks were 
a shield from the arrows of the sun that were 
slaying him as though they had been of steel 
and ash. His "craziness" left him. To-day 
he is still alive and again normal. 

All mankind sprang originally from one 

of two great fountainheads of humanity: 

in the north dwelt the great blond people 

who were eventually destined to go forth 

in a conquering march across the world. 

In the south developed the dark folk, with 

skins equipped to turn the deadly rays of the 

sun. The vast stretch of evolution through 

149 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

which they progressed molded their bodies 
and minds on widely divergent models. 

In the north the air was cold. Hence the 
nose of man adapted itself accordingly. It 
grew large and developed an angle, a bump 
on its bridge, so that the heating passsage 
might be lengthened to raise the temperature 
of the atmosphere before it entered the lungs. 

Man in the south had no such problem. 
Therefore his nose developed little. It was 
short and shallow — sometimes little more 
than two apelike holes in his face. 

Man of the equatorial lands was prevented 
by the heat from strenuous labor. Besides, 
there was no need for it. Food grew in the 
lush tropical jungles in abundance. He had 
only to reach forth his hand to obtain it. 
Houses were little more than flimsy protec- 
tions from the rain. There was nothing to 
drive him to physical exercise. 

Northern man had to work hard to live. 
The stern climate, the rigorous winters, 
forced him to tremendous physical endeavor 
to obey the first of Nature's Three Command- 
ments — Live. His lungs became deep; his 
muscles strong; his heart large and powerful. 
He became adapted for violent action. He 
became the "doer." 

One other broad distinction also evolved — 
a color distinction. Southern man had to 

150 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL 

shield his eyes as well as his body from the 
rays of the sun. They became excessively 
pigmented also, dark, filled with a sun- 
resisting substance termed "melonin." 

Protected by the fog and mist and cloud 
of his northern home, blond man required 
no such protection. His eyes remained 
light — either blue or gray. 

Let us get a picture of the two extremes in 
human development. The man of the north 
— hook-nosed, fair of hair and skin, deep 
of chest, strong of heart, loving action, blue 
or gray eyed. Man of the south — short or 
flat nosed, dark of hair and skin and eye, 
shallow-chested, with a small heart, de- 
liberate in his motion. 

The north-man, because of his body that 
cried for activity, sought achievement and 
recognition on land and sea. The southern 
man, because life was rich and existence easy, 
turned to thought in his search for greatness. 
He became the philosopher, the thinker, the 
founder of religions. His blond brother be- 
came the doer — the sailor, the soldier, the 
leader. 

Because the man of the south thought 
while his counterpart in the north acted, 
their cranial forms also diverged. The north- 
ern man used his body to get greatness. 
This expanded, while his brain did not push 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

against the skull. His forehead remained 
sloping. The southern man's brain grew 
more than his body. His forehead became 
high and rounded. 

In the thousands of years since this dis- 
tinction was first established and since the 
two types of man developed to their most 
divergent stage, the world has become linked 
and interwoven with means of communica- 
tion. Ships and railroads have married 
these two divergent types. As a result, 
races that hitherto were as cut off from one 
another as though they lived on different 
planets have met and intermingled. 

The vast majority of the Western World 
to-day is neither pure blond nor pure brunet. 
The races have fused and become one. 
But the fusion is not perfect. In each of us 
one or the other breed predominates. Man 
has a blond and a brunet percentage. The 
one that is dominant determines in large part 
his destiny. 

The man with the hooked nose, the reced- 
ing forehead, the fair skin is still the man of 
action. Place him in a position of quies- 
cence for any great length of time, where 
contemplative thought is required, and he is 
unhappy. If the blond is strong enough 
his condition becomes unendurable. 

On the other hand, give the dark-eyed, 
\ 152 



PSYCHOPHYSICAL 

swarthy-skinned man with the high fore- 
head and short nose work demanding chiefly 
physical exertion, and he will object or, if 
the drive is strong enough, openly resist it. 
He is the thinker, the philosopher. 

Here we have the psychophysical at work 
again — shape and color are exercising a 
definite effect upon man's conduct in the 
world of reality. 

Were man more skilled in weighing the in- 
fluence of his racial ancestry — his physical 
qualities — his mind might oftener drive suc- 
cessful bargains with the world for the three 
great things that Nature has decreed he must 
obtain in order to live. 

ii 



XII 

BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

A MAN who harnessed his delicately con- 
structed, carefully finished touring car 
to a gang of plows for the purpose of turning 
up a field should not complain if thereafter 
his neighbors hinted that he was insane. 
If, in addition, he was accustomed to take his 
family for pleasure trips along the highway 
in a snorting, iron-shod farm tractor, he 
might sooner or later become the subject of a 
commission in lunacy. 

It would not be so much the wastefulness 
of his action that would irritate beholders as 
it would be the apparent inability of the 
owner of the touring car and the tractor to 
understand the legitimate use of his machines. 

Yet — to carry the analogy a step farther — 
the farmer who guffawed at the sight of his 
neighbor doing his plowing by touring car 
might return to his home and without a qualm 
lead to the woodshed for punishment his dark- 
eyed, snub-nosed son who would rather sit 
and read history than spade up the garden. 

iS4 



BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

And after shaking his head at the sight of 
his neighbor rolling along the road in a 
tractor he would see nothing incongruous 
in his indignation toward his gray-eyed, 
hooked-nose older son who wanted to be a 
sailor rather than go to the normal school. 

Nor would he, in sorrowing over the stub- 
bornness of the younger generation, ever 
think that he was maltreating machinery 
quite as flagrantly as his neighbor. 

Man, mentally and physically, is a ma- 
chine. Science knows this and the world is 
gradually accepting this view. But society, 
after accepting, has not yet taken the next 
forward step. But the mechanism of each 
individual differs from all others. And the 
purpose for which every separate machine 
has been designed can almost always be told 
from the man's face. 

Man is a machine with the directions for 
use written on his physiognomy — which 
society in general neglects to read. Through 
this omission much of the unrest and dis- 
content in the world has developed, and 
psychologists have been forced to recognize 
and attempt to cope with the protests of the 
psychophysical against unendurable condi- 
tions of life. 

Through neglect, ignorance, and economic 
pressure time after time the blond, hooked- 

155 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

nosed man is forced into a sedentary, con- 
templative occupation, and the brunet with 
shallow nose is obliged to win his livelihood 
by bodily sweat. The tractor is used as a 
pleasure car; the touring car is pressed into 
service for plowing. 

Eventually, under such circumstances, a 
break must come in the human and material 
mechanisms. Man revolts, unconsciously or 
consciously, against unendurable conditions. 
He becomes ill, or he throws over his job and 
quits, or he continues to labor while mutter- 
ing the doctrine of the I. W. W. and the 
Bolsheviki. 

Already we have enumerated the basic 
forces that lie behind this tremendous prob- 
lem of the present. We have seen how 
through hundreds of years the racial barriers 
have been broken down and the integrity of 
the pure blond and pure brunet has been in 
large part lost. In most of us lies inheritance 
from both races. But in nearly all one or the 
other — the heritage of the thinker or the 
doer — predominates. 

The dominant drive is indicated almost in- 
fallibly by facial conformation. Nose with 
a bump, receding forehead, and light eyes — 
a doer; shallow nose, prominent forehead, 
and eyes darkened with the sun-resisting 
substance melonin — a thinker. If man is 

156 



BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

blond of eye he will love the sea, where damp 
clouds keep the actinic rays of the sun from 
searing him; if brunet of eye he will love 
the uplands and arid regions. 

After more than two years' observation 
and an investigation among more than a 
thousand sailors in various parts of the 
country I have found that more than 90 
per cent are light-eyed. During the war 
I had occasion to visit a naval hospital 
near New York in company with another 
physician. 

"You will find," I told him before we 
entered, "that at least eight out of ten 
patients here will be dark-eyed." 

There were eighty patients in the ward we 
visited. All of them had dark eyes. For 
some reason these men had gone against their 
heritage. Though the sun-resisting, philo- 
sophical type predominated in their make- 
up, they had sought the sea. They had 
run contrary to the directions for existence 
stamped upon their faces, and their ma- 
chinery had broken down. 

Intermarriage between the people of the 
north and south has given to their children, 
as we have said, a mixed inheritance. In 
other words, in most of us two drives are 
clamoring for satisfaction. A man maybe 
70 per cent brunet and only 30 per cent blond. 

iS7 



_. ----- ""*" 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

If he has been fortunate he will be engaged 
in some sedentary occupation. But the time 
will come when the brunet drive within him 
will have been satisfied and the demands of 
his blond inheritance will be heard. 

He will desert his desk suddenly to tramp 
the hills, or play golf, or satisfy the clamor 
of the doer in his cosmos in some similar 
way, to return later and take up his work 
with the brunet 70 per cent of himself 
again. 

But he must satisfy the 30 per cent. He 
cannot dally with Nature, or else he "goes 
stale/' If he trifles too long with the desire 
for exercise of the starved blond part of him, 
illness, mental or physical, grips him and 
drags him away from work that has become 
abhorrent. 

Society has made one concession to this 
dual make-up of man. It has decreed that 
each year the worker must have a vacation. 
In a week or two the blond must gratify 
his brunet cravings for the coming year; 
the brunet must satisfy his impulse to be a 
doer. Could the perfect work be devised 
for each individual — could civilization read 
the formula of man's composition accu- 
rately and set him at labor which would 
gratify both sides of his make-up — there 
would be no need of vacation, for man would 

158 



BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

obtain all that he desired while continuing 
to advance the welfare of the race. 

But civilization, thus far, has made little 
attempt to read the label at all. Because of 
this neglect endless unhappiness, long series 
of tragedies that have their root in what the 
world calls inefficiency and idlessness, ensue. 

Take a fifty-fifty man — one in whom the 
blond and brunet inheritance are evenly 
divided. Unless he can be placed in some 
form of labor where thought and contem- 
plation are evenly balanced with physical 
exertion, he is foredoomed to whole or par- 
tial failure. At work in an iron foundry, or 
on a farm, he cannot compete on equal terms 
with one whose inheritance is 80 per cent 
blond. He will be branded as "lazy" or 
"good for nothing " unless in his few hours of 
daily relaxation he is able to satisfy the 
brunet portion of him. 

Make him a teacher or a lawyer and you 
will have the same result. He will idle away 
his time or come to the point where he can 
no longer stand exercising only the brunet 
half of himself and quit. Through no fault 
of his own his life may end in stark tragedy 
because society gives him no fair chance 
to satisfy equally the demands of his heri- 
tage. 

Again, the gloom of impending tragedy 

iS9 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

always seems to me to hang over a child 
with prominent forehead and turned-up nose 
who is being reared without higher education. 
Yet, because our civilization has not yet 
learned to read the label which says, "Here 
is a person who will make a good teacher, 
lawyer, historian, philosopher, but will be 
a failure as a day laborer/' little attention is 
paid to this neglect. 

The child with shallow nose and bulging 
forehead will never be able to compete on 
equal terms with the doers — the large- 
hearted, slanting foreheads with their bumped 
noses and deep lungs. Nature destined him 
to be a thinker — and a society that does not 
see to it that he receives the education to 
fortify him for that end is dooming the child 
to misery. 

Not only that. Society is creating a men- 
ace for itself. Philosophy, logic, reason will 
flow from a child when he reaches manhood 
as readily from ignorance and a warped 
viewpoint as they might have from the clear 
enlightenment he has been denied. 

If through unfortunate circumstances he 
has been barred from the legitimate nourish- 
ment afforded in schools and universities, he 
will feed his intellect upon the bastard gospel 
promulgated by other starvelings like him- 
self — those pathetic inefficients who preach 

1 60 



BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

the overthrow of a system that has turned a 
deaf ear to the cry of their inheritance. He 
will become an anarchist, an I. W. W., a 
Bolshevik. 

The high forehead, the upturned nose have 
been completely ignored by society. The 
touring car has been hitched to the plow, and 
because of this blind ignorance of human 
mechanics the machine has been ruined. It 
makes a poor tractor and after being used 
for this purpose it can never run swiftly 
and smoothly along the highways for which 
it was destined. 

The shallow-nosed child with a tremendous 
brain space makes an inefficient laborer 
and can never march in his proper place in 
the advancing ranks of triumphant human 
development. 

Little less tragic is the case of the 
large-nosed, slanting-foreheaded lad plunged 
against his will into work which denies his 
active body its inheritance. 

Only recently I stopped in the office of a 
merchant friend who showed me with a 
despairing gesture a boy sound asleep, his 
head on the desk in front of him. 

"He's hopeless," said my friend. "He's 

the son of (a large stockholder in the 

concern). He's supposed to be learning the 

business. He's stupid and idle and spends 

161 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

most of his time in the office asleep. I don't 
know what we are going to do with him." 

The boy's forehead was slanting. His nose 
had a pronounced bump. 

"What is his work?" I asked, and was told 
that he had been tried out as a clerk and had 
gone to sleep; had been tried as a book- 
keeper and had gone to sleep; and at last 
had been placed as door-tender to the office 
and had continued to spend a large part of 
his time in slumber. 

To one with any skill at all in reading 
Nature's facial label the solution of the case 
was plain. Here was a boy, with a tremen- 
dously dominant blond percentage in his 
make-up, placed in work where he could not 
fulfill its demands. I became friendly with 
him and thus got many of his dreams. 
They were indeed most interesting, for they 
were all of physical prowess. On sea and 
land his deeds of valor were Jules Verne and 
Jack London rolled into one. He was too 
civilized to leave his post. The drive was 
strong and would not be denied and the poor 
lad was handling it in a perfectly natural 
way. In his dreams he was gratifying de- 
sires he could not satisfy in his waking hours. 

To my frankly skeptical friend I explained 
the matter. To-day the lad is an asset to 

the firm which formerly regarded him as a 

162 



BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

distinct detriment. But he is a traveling 
salesman for the company — on the road 
most of the time, adventuring, seeing new 
faces, making conquests in his firm's cam- 
paign for success. He has been given work 
as a doer, not as a thinker. He is drowsy no 
longer, for he is satisfying in his waking life 
what he hitherto could pacify only through 
dreams. 

So it is with all mankind, save for those 
inconsiderable few who have the intelligence 
and the opportunity to regulate their work in 
accordance with the demands of their blond 
and brunet inheritances. Each must be fed, 
and if one, through circumstances, is starved, 
sooner or later the break must come with 
such consequences as illness, idleness, indiffer- 
ence, or open revolt. 

If we apply the acid test of this anthropo- 
logical truth to the phenomenon that society 
has grown to call "mob conduct/' we find 
that this problem is by no means insoluble, 
but breaks up quickly into certain basic 
truths. 

Of recent years, manifestations of this 
mob conduct have multiplied with alarming 
rapidity. Strikes, boycotts, walkouts, riots, 
the tidal wave of Bolshevism are all examples 
of it and all can be traced back to anthropo- 
logical inheritances battling against the con- 

163 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

ditions imposed on man by modern society 
and industry. 

The growth of the labor movement and the 
increasing solidarity among the workers is 
not responsible primarily for the discontent 
that is ageing employers before their time. 
Rather, the entire history of union growth is 
the outcome of the underlying trouble. 

As industry has developed, the activities 
of man in industry have correspondingly 
narrowed. In earlier years the craftsman 
worked not only with his hands, but with his 
brain. He turned the spokes for a wagon 
on his lathe, but he was also looking ahead to 
fitting those spokes in the hub, to fashioning 
the axles, to assembling the body. While 
his hands were at work with the spokes, his 
mind was contemplating the finished wagon 
that was to be the work of those hands. 

Thus the labor of the maker of vehicles 
fifty or sixty years ago was diversified. It 
afforded satisfaction for both his blond and 
his brunet inheritance — his desire to do and 
his desire to think constructively. Therefore 
the craftsman was reasonably content with 
his employment. 

Since then, in the vast strides that in- 
dustry has made, the work of man has be- 
come more and more specialized. There has 

been a definite cleavage. Man is no longer 

164 



BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

both a thinker and a worker. He is one or 
the other — either an executive who does not 
exert his body, but does the contemplative, 
constructive thinking for a hundred or a 
thousand bodies, or else a laborer or mechanic 
who thinks scarcely at all, but is concerned 
only in repeating over and over throughout 
the working day one small step toward the 
completion of the firm's product. 

Labor has been robbed of its diversity — 
the element that hitherto stood for content- 
ment. There are few vehicle builders to-day; 
few men who create with their own hands 
and minds a wagon out of the raw material 
spread before them. 

Visit a factory of the wagon's modern suc- 
cessor, the automobile, and what do we see? 
In one room a hundred men who do nothing 
throughout their working hours but bore a 
little hole in one special place in one specially 
formed piece of steel. In another a like 
number devote all their labor to cutting 
threads on the end of another piece of steel. 
In a third, men do nothing but fasten two 
steel plates together by bolts. 

Efficiency and the pressure of modern 
competition have robbed labor of its diver- 
sity, have stolen the worker's vision. He 
no longer is able to think ahead as he 
labors to the next step he is to undertake, 

165 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

and the next, and the next, and finally to the 
moment when the completed car will roll 
forth, the work of his hands — the product of 
the thinker and the doer in his nature, the 
gratification of his desire To Be Great. 

All that has been taken from him. He sits 
at a bench and operates a drill, or follows a 
pattern, or handles a metal punch, all day 
long, and starves psychically. Labor to-day 
fails to satisfy both the thinker and doer in 
man. It also is lamentably faulty in satis- 
fying the basic drive for achievement and 
recognition . In consequence, when a crisis 
comes and labor must be speeded up to its 
utmost, society takes to supplying artifi- 
cially what it cannot furnish the worker in 
the natural course of his industrial life. 

The government recognized this when the 
demand for ships was enormously urgent. 
It found that the appeal to abstract patriot- 
ism, including enormous wages, could not 
force man to labor at the height of his power. 
Accordingly, it gave back to the worker, 
through outside means, the things of which 
modern industry had robbed him. Through 
entertainments, clubhouses, athletic com- 
petitions, it strove to give him enough 
diversity in his employment to keep him 
satisfied. Through the artificial stimulation 
of competition between various shipyards it 

166 



BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

furnished laborers with a chance to achieve 
in the course of their work satisfaction of the 
To-Be-Great desire. 

Plays, moving pictures, addresses by no- 
tables, ball games, all these were offered the 
workers, free of charge, as recompense for the 
monotony of their employment. Riveters 
were encouraged to attempt to make a record 
in driving the steel bolts that hold the ships 
together. Their achievements received much 
publicity. Pictures of them were printed 
in the newspapers and their efforts were 
awarded more substantially by bonuses. 
Rivalry between shipyards was stimulated, 
and the achievement of this or that yard 
made much of. Thus the directors of the 
shipbuilding program endeavored to give 
back to labor, temporarily, at least, the op- 
portunity to achieve and obtain recognition. 

But this excitement, this spirit of com- 
petition, cannot, or at least has not, been 
carried through to industry on a peace foot- 
ing. And because of the lack of diversity 
and the absence of opportunity to achieve 
greatness, because of the endless punching 
of holes, and screwing of bolts, and following 
of one pattern, mar, individually and col- 
lectively, eventually revolts. 

Working under similar conditions, men, 

whether bound by the formal ties of a labor 

167 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

union or not, become, sooner or later, welded 
together into a mob, and eventually resort 
to mob conduct — the strike, the walk out, 
the riot — to get what they have been denied 
physically and psychologically, during their 
labor. 

At a certain shipyard on Staten Island an 
interesting manifestation of this mob conduct 
takes place daily. At four-thirty in the 
afternoon a whistle blows, terminating the 
day's labor. Its blast is blotted out by the 
wild yell that rises from the men who a 
second before have been bending soberly 
to their tasks. This is followed by a mad 
rush of a thousand shouting, whooping 
maniacs for the boat that waits to transport 
them to Manhattan. Tools are dropped and 
left. The men do not wait to crowd across 
the gangplank. They crawl up the sides of 
the craft, wriggle through windows — any- 
thing to get away from the psychic torture of 
specialized labor. 

They are desperate. Freed from the work, 
to which they have been forcing themselves, 
by the blast of the whistle, they seek frantic- 
ally for diversion, strive to obtain recogni- 
tion, denied them at their work, by uncouth 
childish antics among their fellows. 

It is the same spirit which turns these sober 

mechanics into skylarking children that lies 

168 



BLONDS AND BRUNETS 

behind the strike and the riot — so frequent 
a manifestation in the history of modern 
labor. It is the break, the explosion, that 
must eventually come so long as men work 
under present conditions of industry, and its 
source is as old as the blending of the north- 
ern blond and the southern brunet into one 
race. 

Give the average man a job that fits the 
demands of his blond and brunet inheritance 
and in addition furnishes him with oppor- 
tunity To Be Great, and you will find that his 
wage is, after all, a comparatively minor 
matter. All of us have known persons 
"wedded to their jobs" who have declined 
to change to other employment at higher pay 
because they were contented with their 
present lot. 

From the purely monetary point of view 
these men may not be regarded as suc- 
cesses by the world at large, but they are 
getting more of the vital, basic worth out of 
life than most of their brethren who may 
rejoice in infinitely more pay for their labor. 

The menace of Bolshevism in America 
has its root in the civilian population. It 
springs from those who stayed at home — not 
from the army or navy. Why ? 

In the service, man is fed a balanced 

physical and psychic ration. He is forced to 
12 169 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

think for himself and is forced to exercise his 
body. Thus he is compelled to satisfy both 
his blond and brunet inheritance. Further 
than this, his desire To Be Great is fed by 
promotion following achievement and by 
medals attesting to noteworthy action. In a 
system of this sort unrest does not readily 
make headway. 

But among the " misfits" in civil life the 
blonds chained to office desks, the brunets 
who wield pick and shovel, the great mass 
who through the modern industrial system 
are robbed of their chance To Be Great, 
radicalism, revolt of all sorts, find fertile 
ground. And the force that has evoked that 
menace is the same drive that made the lad 
with the slanting forehead and high-bridged 
nose slumber instead of work; that makes the 
men of the Staten Island shipyard run 
screaming to their boat when the whistle 
blows. 

The world will insist upon trying to plow 
with a touring car and race along the road 
with a tractor. 



XIII 



mental inheritance. "splitting up of 
phenomena" 



MAN has proclaimed himself "conqueror 
of the air." He has fashioned himself 
ships that venture fishlike through the dark- 
ness of the submarine wastes. Daily millions 
of humans are at work inventing, altering, 
improving engines and materials so that man 
may further extend his underwater and aerial 
adventures. Why ? 

The aviator, the submarine builder, will 
tell you that his work is done solely for the 
purpose of bettering and making happier the 
human race. He will probably talk largely 
of Science and of his loyalty to her. He is 
deceiving himself and you, if you believe him. 

It is not love of science, nor the con- 
queror's lust, to bring new worlds under his 
sway that have driven man to the air and the 
depths of the sea. In my belief it is home- 
sickness. 

In the course of his evolution man has been 

both fish and bird. Even though he has 

dropped his scales and fins, his feathers and 

171 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

wings, in his upward climb, through inher- 
ited recollection there comes to him the faint- 
est memory of his joy in his former domains. 

When he flies, when he takes to the sub- 
marine, he is trying to get back to these lost 
provinces, and to that end he is building 
himself mechanical bodies to approximate 
the shapes that were his, in his paleozoic days. 
" Man stands, at the peak of things, the 
most splendid product of the terrific travail 
that evolved a world from chaos. He is the 
child of endless thousands of years of human 
development upward from the first ape-man. 
And he is more — child of the fish, child of the v 
serpent, child of the bird. Wjl*4 *U"VU*JuO Uu|fl 

Hold in mind that picture of man, the j 
ultimate and supreme product of creation, 
with a heritage stretching back to the 
protozoa, and turn your eyes for a moment 
to the kitten at play upon the floor. 

The little creature plays with a ball of 
yarn and, tiring of its frolic, laps up a saucer 
of milk and then stretches itself to sleep 
before the fire. A sudden noise arouses it 
from its slumber and it stands, hair on end, 
eyes dilated, claws extended, teeth bared, 
prepared to the best of its ability for what- 
ever menace the sound may presage. 

It is a living, moving sentient creature. 
Yet no thought, no self-created conception, 

172 



«-- 



MENTAL INHERITANCE 

lies behind its action. It is as subservient 
to the law of the ages which governs its con- 
duct as is a flame to the mandates of chem- 
istry and physics. Frighten the cat and it 
will inevitably respond by certain mani- 
festations. Pour water on the fire and the 
hiss and cloud of steam that result are no 
more unvarying than the kitten's reaction 
to certain conditions. 

Two great things stand behind every move- 
ment which the animal makes: first, in- 
herited knowledge, stored away in the brain 
during endless generations of development; 
second, the shape and construction of the 
body upon which this inherited knowledge 
or "instinct" reacts. 

In other words, the kitten is a perfectly 
dependable machine, guaranteed by its shape 
and the influence of instinct upon the secre- 
tions of its body to respond to stimuli with 
regular and unvarying reactions. 

We flatter ourselves that we have domes- 
ticated it, but Nature does not concede this. 
In proof of her defiance we find that the 
jealous old designer of us all has not seen fit 
to withdraw from shape or secretions that 
respond to instinct one part of the original 
purpose that caused her to create, thousands 
of years before, the predatory, merciless 
grandfather of all the cats. 



173 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Potentially, the cat of to-day is the cat of 
thousands of years ago, responding as always 
to the laws of its make-up — its instinct 
which cries, "I want," or, "I don't want," 
in response to the chemical action of pollen 
upon its sense of smell and taste, vibration 
on sight and hearing, and the electric 
phenomena of touch. 

The responses of the cat machine to these 
stimuli are not the product of any conscious 
thought, any more than it is possible for the 
fire to take counsel with itself whether or not 
it will go out when water is poured upon 
it. They are purely automatic reactions, 
evolved by ages of ancestral experience. 

Turn now from the kitten to man, its 
master, standing at the apex of all creation. 
He, too, is possessed of "instinct," an un- 
conscious mind which holds the experiences 
of his forbears. He has also a body that 
responds to the mandates of this force and 
releases secretions to fit him to meet crises 
which confront him. 

Many of these crises are similar to those 
which the kitten faces. Man is hungry and 
the secretions of his stomach cry for food. 
He is afraid and adrenal is poured into his 
blood, thereby contracting his muscles, dilat- 
ing his eyes, driving the blood more swiftly 
through his veins. 

i74 



MENTAL INHERITANCE 

But man holds something that the kitten or 
any other of the lower forms of life does not 
possess: an analytical ability — the power to 
dissect the gross phenomena that confront 
him. 

Fear, the terrible, confronts the kitten, 
which sees it only in its entirety. Fear con- 
fronts man, who divines its source, its prob- 
able result, and its component parts. The 
kitten hears in a sudden concussion only the 
approach of unknown danger. Man knows 
whether it is a gunshot, a bomb, or a falling 
body. If it be the last he can tell its ap- 
proximate size and shape and to a large de- 
gree its make-up. 

Man sees a fish swimming or a bird flying. 
To him it is more than gross food which he 
longs to eat. In watching the fish and the 
bird he is also conscious of the phenomena 
of push and stroke and movement and 
balance. 

To a lower animal the sight of a water- 
fowl winging its way across a sunset would 
mean nothing more than a possible dinner, 
unfortunately out of reach. His sole reac- 
tion to the vision would be the possible 
stimulation of the gastric secretions and the 
birth of an alimentary "I want" desire. 

Yet the picture of the wild bird in flight 
across the afterglow, when received by the 

i7S 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

human mind of Bryant, became something 
more than a direct appeal to the stomach. 
The phenomenon was split up into several 
detached thoughts which, reassembled in 
"Ode to a Water Fowl," tells of balance, 
height, color, the solitude of the sky spaces. 
Not these alone. The mind of the poet 
seemed able to reflect not a little of the 
actual experience of the bird itself in its 
journeying. So highly developed was his 
faculty of splitting up a gross impression 
and recombining it, that one might almost 
imagine that his poem to the wild goose or 
duck had been written by another wild goose 
or duck with a human mind. 

This quality of mental analysis, of abstract 
thought, is a peculiar and exclusive posses- 
sion of the mind of man. Its source and 
mechanism cannot be plotted out definitely 
and certainly. However, it seems to me, 
that by traveling back down the long corridor 
of the past through which man toiled upward 
to humanness we may obtain pragmatic 
conclusions similar to those which have been 
gained from other adventures down into the 
primal darkness. 

As we journeyed back along the corridor 

we find man as a savage, an ape, a bird, a 

reptile, a fish, an invertebrate, a protozoan. 

These are the enormous steps in his pedigree 

176 



MENTAL INHERITANCE 

which reaches back unbroken to First Things. 
We know these same steps are repeated, in 
inverse progression, in the development of 
the fertilized human ovum. 

To know that through the interminable 
growth of the unicellular beginning into man 
the brain has evolved and developed with 
the rest of the organs. We know that in his 
inconceivably long journey up the corridor 
of development man has dragged along, not 
only his body, but his mind. We know 
further that both mind and body retain 
heritages from each tremendous upward 
stage through which they have ventured 
together. 

In other words, in the brain of man is 
folded away unconscious recollection of his 
life as a fish, a serpent or lizard, a bird, an ape. 

Is it not possible then that the human 
power of breaking up thought into its com- 
ponent parts, of forming detached concep- 
tions, may spring from these memories 
tucked away in the brain? May not the 
unconscious recollection of experiences en- 
countered in those earlier stages of develop- 
ment be the source of man's ability to split 
up phenomena into many component, de- 
tached thoughts, and to reassemble them into 
conceptions which have no place whatever in 

actual, normal life? 

177 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

May it not have been man's unconscious 
recollection of his life as a fish that led him 
to people the submarine wastes with mer- 
maids and mermen ? He knew perfectly well 
that if he remained under water he died. But 
his mind was not satisfied with the thought 
that man was barred from existence beneath 
the waves, and so he created a race, partly 
human at least, that did live beneath them. 

Man of centuries ago proved to his own 
satisfaction that he was not master of the air, 
that he was doomed through life to crawl 
along the ground. Yet he peopled the air 
with creatures in his own image that had 
wings and could fly through the heavens. 
May not this have been inspired by his 
unrecognized memory of the time when he 
was a bird and flew? 

Surely with these two crude examples at 
hand the finer quality of the detached 
thought of Bryant's ode takes on a new 
significance. It is not entirely grotesque to 
imagine now that the poet was thinking of 
the time when he was a fellow with this 
wild fowl. 

This much is certain: no other animal 
has ever displayed man's peculiar trait of 
thought detachment; no other animal has 
ever exhibited the peculiar human obsession 

to be all species of animal. 

178 



MENTAL INHERITANCE 

As formidable as the inherited knowledge, 
the unconscious recollection, which is the 
great drive of the unconscious mind, stands 
the drive of the conscious — the desire To 
Be Great. This in itself debars all admission 
of littleness, of ignorance. Such confessions 
are intolerable to it. 

The To-Be-Great drive sees man reaching 
upward. It will never admit that he is being 
pushed from behind. It will force an aero- 
nautical expert to speak of the conquests 
he is making in the interests of science and 
humanity. It will not permit him to attrib- 
ute his labor to his bird hunger for the air. 
Never will it allow man to place upon his 
actions anything but the most exalted in- 
terpretation. So it blocks at the beginning 
what might be tremendous investigations 
along the trail I have blazed so tentatively 
and painstakingly. 

The pitiful materials with which the To- 
Be-Great desire will work to enforce its stand, 
even in the most enlightened person, are at 
times appalling. Nor will man admit that 
his desire for achievement and recognition 
is the impulse behind his action, for by such 
admission he would overthrow all that he 
was striving for. 

Cornered, he will attempt to disprove his 

subservience to the drive by giving in- 

179 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

numerable examples of how he is running 
counter to all his own best interests in or- 
der to accomplish something which he feels 
must be done. He will describe how he has 
turned from reward, comfort, happiness to 
pursue the stern path of duty, at a sacrifice 
to himself, never seeing that by picturing his 
martyrdom he is limning himself as Great; 
never admitting the unvarying truth that 
lies behind all human action — man always 
does what he wants most to do. 

Only recently a woman patient and I 
locked horns on this very subject. She 
denied flatly and stubbornly my every as- 
sertion of the domination that the desire 
To Be Great has over every human. She 
contradicted desperately every statement I 
made and yet gave no actual disproval of 
any one of them. 

There she was, fighting against admission 
that she was under the domination of that 
drive, impelled in her battle by the very To- 
Be-Great desire which she denied existed. 

" No, Doctor, you are wrong," constituted 
the bulk of her statements. Finally in des- 
peration she said: 

" I punished my son this morning, Doctor. 
I love him better than anything in this world. 
Do you suppose I did that because I wanted 

to do it more than anything else in this world ? 

1 80 



MENTAL INHERITANCE 

Did I do that because I wished to be 
great ?" 

"You did/' I replied, "for both reasons. 
You wanted to punish him. Also you 
wanted To Be Great. The latter was grati- 
fied just as soon as you had punished him. 
You wanted to punish him — " 

She broke in upon the sentence hotly. 
"What nonsense you are talking, Doctor! 
Do you think I actually wanted to inflict 
suffering upon my son ?" 

Then at length and with great detail she 
proceeded to marshal before me splendid and 
noble reasons for not inflicting pain on any- 
thing, far less upon the thing that was dearer 
to her than all else in the world. 

"Nevertheless," I said, when she had 
ended, "in spite of all your noble reasons for 
not wishing to punish your boy you did 
punish him." 

"I did it, Doctor," she almost screamed, 
" because while I hated to do it I could not bear 
to think of him growing up a thief and a liar." 

I could not help smiling at this admission. 
'You did not want him to become a thief 
and a liar," I replied ; "you wanted him to be 
honest and truthful. You wanted to punish 
him because of the other want for him that 
lay behind the punishment. And that out- 
weighed all of your reasons for desiring not 

181 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

to punish him. In other words, you did 
what you wanted most to do." 

So we stand and so we will remain while the 
human mind retains its present mechanism 
and operation. Invariably man's conscious 
mind for the sake of the To-Be-Great drive 
will resist desperately admission of anything 
that tends to drag it down from its self- 
made superiority to seeming inferiority. It 
cannot be forced to admit that it has not 
supreme and absolute command over matter 
and man. 

In making a judgment or a decision we 
place upon either side of the scales ou 
"wants" and "don't wants." And as the 
scale turns so we act. We do or we do not 
as the "want" or "don't want" bears down. 
We follow our predominant desire. 

But we will not admit to the world or to 
our dearest and nearest that we are doing 
something plainly and simply because we 
want to. That is the tragedy of it. The 
To-Be-Great desire forever bars the way to 
the actual truth. 

In order to be greater than I the mother 
who punished her child fooled herself and 
attempted to blind me by enumerating all 
of the things on the lighter side of the scale. 
Yet these had served no purpose whatever 

in determining her act. These she had cast 

182 



MENTAL INHERITANCE 

aside and had gone ahead and done as she 
pleased. 

Yet her To-Be-Great desire would not 
permit her to admit this. This same drive 
stands, armed and jealous, forever barring the 
threshold against intensive individual in 
vestigation of man's strange quality of de- 
tached thought. 

Most subtle and confusing to the layman 
are the means by which this desire some- 
times proceeds to attain its ends. I have a 
patient whose whole output of conversation 
consists of the belittlement of people and 
things. He looks upon the whole world 
with the contempt of a skeptic and cynic 
and yet with each word of scorn or contempt 
he utters he is feeding his desire for greatness. 

By belittling all things he is achieving 
without being called upon to display any 
deep knowledge or accomplish any con- 
structive work. He avoids the unendurable 
feeling of inferiority by tearing down all 
things that, by their manifest superiority, 
threaten his own sense of greatness. 

The attitude of my patient may be seen re- 
peated in the mentally and physically indolent 
and in the ignorant. Unwilling or unable to 
compete in humanity's great struggle toward 
achievement and recognition, they resort to 
destruction as a substitute for creation. 

183 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Destruction is, without doubt, one of the 
earliest known forces. Man slew and wrecked 
and tore down long before he learned to 
build. It is obvious that as civilization 
progresses, as the standards of achievement 
and recognition are raised continually higher, 
the satisfaction of the To-Be-Great desire 
becomes increasingly difficult. 

Therefore, the weak and the lazy refuse to 
play the game according to the twentieth- 
century rules. Instead of creators, they be- 
come iconoclasts. Unable or unwilling to 
put forth the effort to obtain the modern 
standard of greatness, the unremitting hunger 
for success is gratified by the Archaic portions 
of their minds. They belittle, they sneer and 
mock, they destroy, and so satisfy their 
desires for achievement and recognition. 

"Yet how," the doubter asks, "do certain 
common emotions of humanity admit of 
explanation if we consider that man always 
does what he wants to do most; that life is 
but a series of desires gratified ? 

"How do anger, oppression, dissatisfaction, 
hatred, aid in achieving greatness?" 

Manifestly these emotions are not desires 
gratified according to the standards of modern 
existence. Latently they are, and it is with 
the latent rather than the manifest side of 
existence that the psychoanalyst is concerned. 

184 



MENTAL INHERITANCE 

Anger, depression — all of them — are mani- 
festly unpleasant and disturbing. It is to be 
remembered that we are considering them 
not in their association with action, but as 
silent concepts. In this sense they are purely 
and clearly the result of a thwarting of the 
desire To Be Great. Consciously or mani- 
festly, we may describe anger or hatred or 
depression as the result of the failure of some 
specific achievement. Latently, or uncon- 
sciously, they are gratification in the Archaic 
of the desire To Be Great, which has been 
denied its proper food in the sphere of con- 
scious civilized existence. 

Failure is as abhorrent to the desire To 
Be Great as a vacuum is to Nature. If the 
drive is thwarted in the present it rushes back 
into the Archaic for satisfaction, and the 
unconscious mind master of the emotional 
secretions of the body, substitutes for the 
thrill of accomplishment, which has been 
denied, another emotion with the same sen- 
satory components — alertness, muscular ten- 
sion, and the grim silence of mortal combat — 
and the feeling of inferiority is shortly wiped 
out by Archaic achievement. 

Often the achievement of the desire To 

Be Great is most amazingly hidden. At 

times the manifestation seems to hold not 

the least hint of the latent drive behind it. 
13 185 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Even the individuals under examination 
may not have the slightest conception of 
what Nature is doing. They proceed with 
their own peculiar lines of conduct with no 
knowledge of the intrigue and masquerading 
which the unconscious mind is employing to 
achieve satisfaction for a consciously un- 
recognized desire for greatness. 

Two years ago I had as a patient a married 
woman of early middle life who had divorced 
her husband. She was an extremely re- 
ligious person. So deep was her conscious 
reverence, in fact, that she had had erected 
in one of her rooms a little private sanctuary 
where she spent many hours each day in 
contemplation and prayer. 

She was attractive and extremely well-to- 
do and was active in society, giving and 
attending many receptions and dinner par- 
ties. Yet she had one marked peculiarity 
at which her friends laughed in secret and 
tolerated for her sake. She loathed the 
theater. 

Why? They were playgrounds of the 
devil. Actors and actresses also came under 
her most virulent condemnation. She re- 
fused steadfastly even to meet them in a 
social way, nor would she attend any function 
at which one of them was to be present. 

In the prolonged course of her psycho- 

186 



MENTAL INHERITANCE 

analysis, during which I was obliged to delve 
through many overlying strata to reach the 
truth — the secret of the driving force that 
made her gratify a latent desire by her 
peculiar conduct — I asked her what she 
prayed for in her many solitary hours in her 
sanctuary. And with her answer I found the 
broad trail that led directly to the craving, so 
deeply hidden in her unconscious mind that 
she herself did not know of its existence. 

What did she pray for? Oh, she daily 
implored the Deity that she be spared from 
becoming as actors and actresses. 

But why? Because they were the most 
immoral of people. 

Again why? Well, they rarely married, 
and when they did they were chronically 
unfaithful to each other. If they did not 
they were disgustingly loose in their stand- 
ards of sexual morality. 

Thus the stark, naked Archaic desire was 
spread before me. In her sanctuary she 
prayed each day the Pharisee's prayer that 
she might not become as she imagined the 
immoral stage folk to be. She had built 
this place of private worship so that she 
might so pray there. 

She was a woman who had been married and 
was no longer living with her husband. The 

Archaic drive was therefore easily determined. 

187 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

She did not recognize it, but her uncon- 
scious mind sought an escapement for it. 
She used her sanctuary, unconsciously, as a 
mental house of assignation, and by meditat- 
ing there, under the guise of prayer, on the 
supposed sexual sins of actors and actresses, 
she thus gratified her own desire to such an 
extent that she was kept from actual physical 
transgressions. 

Proof? A few months ago she married 
again. Since then she has had the sanctuary 
removed. 



XIV 



man's psychic tether 



THE mind of man, which man himself 
loves to picture as free, unrestricted 
soaring to illimitable heights, unbound, un- 
hindered, has actually far less liberty than 
its vainglorious owner ascribes to it. 

We have seen that, as a matter of fact, 
it is tethered uncompromisingly to certain 
things, that it cannot move at all without 
dragging behind it fetters which it can never 
shake off. I have already dwelt at length 
upon the make-up of this chain that is 
riveted to human thought. It is not a 
rigid, uncompromising tether. It can be 
made to give and stretch if man exerts him- 
self. Some are able to manage it so tlrat it 
affords them a broader field of movement 
than do the bonds of their fellows. But it is 
always there — can never be snapped. 

There are three great links to the chain 

that holds the human mind a prisoner. Each 

of these has been dwelt upon in the earlier 

part of this volume. Together they fix a 

limit upon the activity of human thought, 

189 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

but a limit, remember, that varies extremely 
with the individual. 

First of these links is man's heritage from 
his past existence, his unconscious recollec- 
tion of experiences gathered in his upward 
climb from chaos. Hard and rigid is this 
link. Man of the present cannot alter what 
has happened to his forbears. 

To this, in the chain, is joined the drive 
of the conscious mind inherited from the fore- 
conscious — the desire To Be Great. Man 
may have more control over this to a large 
degree, since it is constantly modified by his 
own life span, but this, too, has well-es- 
tablished limits beyond which the tethered 
mind cannot stretch it. These limits have 
been indicated in the last chapter. 

The third and final link in the tether is the 

link of environment, most elastic and variable 

of the three. The amount of freedom which 

its elasticity affords depends in large part 

upon man's individual selection of the life 

he is to lead and the conditions under which 

he is to live it. Let him in his selection 

of a career give thought to his anthropological 

make-up and choose accordingly, and he finds 

that his mind - tether, to succeed, To Be 

Great, is of far greater length than if he 

plunges blindly into an occupation because 

it is the nearest at hand. 

190 



MAN'S PSYCHIC TETHER 

We have already spoken of the blond and 
brunet make-up of man and the influence of 
the psychophysical upon his conduct. These 
are contained in the third link of man's 
thought-tether. 

I have a friend, a physician, who, while in 
the midst of his heavy practice during the 
winter months here in town, drops into the 
habit of becoming violently enraged at the 
telephone. The tinkle of the bell never fails 
to stir up in him a tempest of profane 
wrath. 

Only recently his wife came to me, ex- 
tremely agitated, and confided her fear that 
her husband was going insane. 

"Why, Doctor," she said, "it is perfectly 
frightful the things he says when the tele- 
phone bell rings. He stands before it, 
prances about, shakes his fist at it, and 
swears in a frightful manner." 

This was toward the end of the winter and 
his animosity toward the telephone appeared 
to be getting worse daily, she said. 

"I suppose," she added, "that it's because 
he is tired and overworked that he carries 
on so." 

"He may be tired," I replied, "but it is 
certainly not physical fatigue. If it were he 
would not feel called upon to spend addi- 
tional energy from his failing reserve by 

191 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

swearing, shaking his fist, and dancing about 
in front of the telephone/' 

My friend is blond, with a large bumped 
nose — both signs of the doer. His practice 
demands that he spend a large part of 
his waking life at the bedside of patients 
or at his office desk; by no means the sort 
of work that his large heart and deep lungs 
— forespoken by his color and his large 
aquiline nose — -require. 

"In the summer when he is on his farm, 
does the telephone make him just as angry ?" 
I asked. 

She laughed. "No, indeed ! He will walk 
clear across a field to answer it without a 
single complaint." 

Here was a man that spent his winters in 
an environment unsatisfactory to his physical 
make-up. His body demanded exercise which 
the work he had chosen for his life labor 
denied. So the body attempted to get the 
exercise, anyway. His outbursts of wrath 
against the telephone were merely attempts 
of his physical being to get what it needed 
for existence. 

"Don't worry, Jane," I told his wife. 
"When he rails and swears at the phone 
the poor chap is only plowing up a field on the 
farm." 

Here was a man who in the selection of his 

192 



MAN'S PSYCHIC TETHER 

life work had given no thought to the de- 
mands of his anthropological inheritance. 
And his tether, though stretching at his 
command, could not be perfectly elastic 
since he was pulling it in a wrong direction. 

Man may exploit himself at will, but the 
time will come, if he has not chosen wisely, 
when his physical make-up will revolt and 
seek its needs from the materials at hand. 
Then, if he is a doer in a wrong sort of em- 
ployment, he loses his temper on slight 
provocation, swears at the telephone, fights 
with his wife, or neglects his business for 
golf and tennis. 

If, on the other hand, he is of the philo- 
sophic type misplaced, he oversleeps, misses 
his train, dawdles over his work, steals a nap 
in the afternoon, or develops a grievance and 
leaves his job. 

Observe the mode of life of any man who 
has become conspicuously successful in any 
line of endeavor and it will be found that he 
has designed for himself, consciously or un- 
consciously, a formula of existence that har- 
monizes with his percentage holdings of 
blondness and brunetness. 

On the other hand, man may succeed and 
often does reach great heights in work not 
perfectly fitted for his anthropological make- 
up. To repeat an earlier metaphor, a farm 

i93 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

tractor, if turned into a pleasure car, may 
cover a tremendous distance on the highway, 
but sooner or later its mechanism will protest 
against the ignoring of the purpose for which 
it was constructed. 

The doer in a conceptual job, the philos- 
opher type in work demanding much ex- 
penditure of physical energy, may both suc- 
ceed from a financial point of view, but they 
do not work with perfect economy and 
efficiency. 

My cook has been in my employ for four 
years. Anthropologically speaking, she holds 
60 per cent blondness and 40 per cent brunet- 
ness. Her eyes are of mixed color — more 
light than dark. She has a large bumped 
nose, but a very prominent brunet forehead. 
She is an excellent cook. Otherwise, she is, 
according to modern standards, an extremely 
ignorant woman. 

Yet despite this ignorance she has insisted 
in being, not only her own mentor, but, 
finally, the mentor of the entire household, 
thus following out the promise of her 
prominent forehead. But, in addition, her 
facial label, the large nose and dominant 
blondness of her eyes, proclaim her a good 
worker. 

Cooking for three — another servant, my 

wife, and myself — does not afford a sufficient 

194 



MAN'S PSYCHIC TETHER 

outlet for the secretions poured into her 
system which demand labor. Denied this 
natural outlet, it sought another. Soon 
after coming she fought with the waitress 
until the latter packed up and left. During 
the interim before another waitress was 
hired Helen did double work, cheered up, 
and was at peace again with the world. 
When the new waitress came and took this 
extra labor away from her it was only a few 
weeks before Helen built up a feud against the 
laundress who came two days a week. 
After several verbal battles the laundress 
ceased coming. 

At her earnest solicitation Helen was al- 
lowed to take over the laundry in addition 
to her cooking. Since then the domestic 
atmosphere has been much clearer and 
calmer, with storms only once in six months 
instead of every week or so. 

After each of these periods of stress the 
waitress appears, tears in her eyes, and her 
grip packed for departure, and Helen, after 
a few days of labor as cook, waitress, and 
laundress, is herself again, and peace broods 
once more over the household. 

The woman is 60 per cent doer, but her 
job as cook does not furnish enough action 
or excitement to take off all of the adrenal 
created in her system. She is also 40 per 

i95 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

cent philosopher and accordingly must have 
some delight in dispute and mental contest. 
But she is uneducated and therefore all of 
her mental exercise must be of an Archaic 
sort. It resolves itself into quarrels and 
recriminations in the excitement of which 
free vent is given to the surplus adrenal. 
When the squabble is over and the waitress 
has departed along with the surplus adrenal, 
Helen is calm and cheerful once more. 
^Adrenal is a secretion of a gland in close 
proximity with the kidney. Much light has 
been thrown upon its psychochemical qual- 
ities in recent years. Briefly, it is psychically 
the secretion of labor and fight. When at 
physical work it is poured into the blood in 
relatively small quantities. When fear or 
anger grip a man its flow is tremendously 
augmented, and if too long maintained 
wreaks disaster upon the human organism. 

Laughter and tears are also the result of a 
great influx of adrenal into the blood. Like 
fear and anger, when prolonged they have a 
serious effect upon the human economy. 

Psychologically, both the sob and the 
laugh are confessions of ignorance. It must 
be remembered that the human mind can re- 
main indifferent to nothing that comes within 
its comprehension. For every impression it 

receives there must be a corresponding reac- 

196 



MAN'S PSYCHIC TETHER 

tion. For every thought received some secre- 
tion of the body which is so marvelously 
intermingled with the mind must be released. 

Day and night the mind machine is at 
work, picking up each perception, looking 
it over, and, when possible, filing it away in 
that tremendous card index, the memory, 
for possible future use. 

Occasionally, however, the mind receives 
something that it cannot classify surely and 
certainly. Should it be placed in this part 
of the memory file or in that? There is 
hesitation, doubt, ignorance. The thing un- 
der examination looks like one thing, but it 
may be something else. 

Most frequently this dilemma occurs when 
the mind is confronted with the Rabelaisian, 
the obscene. Here is something whose ap- 
peal is entirely Archaic. But the mind of 
man to-day has risen a step or so above the 
pure Archaic. Accordingly, there is con- 
flict, ignorance of how it should be received. 
For example: 

"How dare you, sir!" she said, "and, 
besides, two dollars is too little." 

"Look at that," says the twentieth- 
century, civilized side of man's mind. " Here 
is tragedy, bitter, terrible tragedy. As that 
it must be listed and filed." 

"Tragedy!" grunts the Archaic, the old 

197 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Adam within us. "Nothing of the kind. 
Perfectly natural. Women are like that." 

So for an instant the human man hesitates, 
uncertain how to handle the thing. But 
there is no toleration of hesitation in man's 
make-up. There must be some immediate 
reaction. The perception must be filed or 
otherwise disposed of. 

In response to his perturbation adrenal 
rushes into the blood and the safety valve 
of laughter or tears is opened. The thing 
that the mind machine could not list and 
classify passes off in guffaws or sobs. 

Both are quite similar as far as their 
physical secretions and manifestations are 
concerned. Both are characteristic of the 
bodily response to adrenal. The lips are 
drawn back, the teeth bared, the muscles 
contracted, and the lungs and heart are 
stimulated to unwonted activity. 

Thus in man's contact with life one of two 
things is going on continually. Either the 
impressions that reach the mind are handled 
quickly and efficiently and listed away in 
their proper compartments, or else their 
effect is thrown off in laughter or tears in- 
spired by the free flow of adrenal. And this, 
as I have said, when it flows too freely and 
often, is exceedingly exhausting to the body. 

I have in mind a patient whose system is 

198 



MAN'S PSYCHIC TETHER 

breaking down under the disastrous effects 
of too much adrenal and whose case illus- 
trates quite clearly the disaster that follows 
upon sustained emotion. He is highly edu- 
cated, a pulpit orator of considerable inter- 
national fame. His anthropologic make-up 
as computed by the chart given at the 
end of this book is 60 per cent blond and 
40 per cent brunet. His eyes are 90 per 
cent blond and 10 per cent brunet. His nose 
is 70 per cent blond and his forehead 80 
per cent brunet. 

The talent which has brought him fame is 
his ability to sway emotions in his addresses 
and sermons. Upon the lecture platform or 
in the pulpit he is able by whipping up his 
own emotions to make his hearers sob or 
laugh with him at will. 

He is much sought, both as preacher and lec- 
turer, and spends much of his time away from 
his home. He makes on an average three 
or four addresses a week — all of them appeals, 
not to reason or logic, but to the emotions. 

He came to me for treatment as an 

alcoholic. The habit had fastened itself 

upon him and he could not shake it off. He 

was taking about a pint of whisky a day, 

yet he was not a drunkard. The liquor did 

not intoxicate him. It only kept his body 

up to the level of the effort required of him. 

199 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Each time he spoke in public the emotional 
type of his address caused adrenal to gush 
into his circulation. When the speech was 
over the heart slowed down, the contracted 
muscles relaxed, and the inevitable exhaus- 
tion with accompanying mental depression 
or exaltation ensued. So he took to drink. 
He needed the "kick" of alcohol so that he 
might go ahead, make his next address, and 
suffer still more severely afterward from 
adrenal poisoning. 

I have listened to his orations many times. 
As an auditor I have found them exhausting 
affairs. When they are over, my eyes are 
blurred with tears or else my whole body is 
keyed up, muscles contracted, in the tense 
posture of the fighter. When the effect 
wears off I find that I am tired. How much 
more terrible must be the strain on him, for 
I hear him only occasionally. 

He frankly admitted in our first profes- 
sional conference that after an address he 
was forced to excuse himself and take a stiff 
"hooker" before he could meet his con- 
gregation, or the committee that would 
wait upon him following a lecture away from 
home. 

Well read and well educated though he 
was, I found that his speeches contained next 
to nothing in the way of specific information 

200 



MAN'S PSYCHIC TETHER 

of an enlightening nature. They were one 
thing and one thing only — emotional ap- 
peals, pathos, tears, laughter, summonses to 
battle for this, that, and the other thing. 

His perorations left one intellectually about 
where he had been when the sermon or lec- 
ture started, but emotionally lifted him to 
the skies or molded him into the alert 
truculent attitude of the Archaic warrior, 
facing something, he knew not what. 

Anthropologically, he was leading the 
proper sort of existence. He spent his 60 
per cent of blondness in travel and golf. 
His conceptual 40-per-cent side was cared 
for by books and social intercourse. He was 
well nourished and of excellent appearance. 
But he was and still is driving straight for 
disaster. 

All this I explained to him. He followed 
me and agreed with me. I then advised him 
to tone down the emotional element in his 
speeches and inject formulative logic. 

"Write at least half of each of your 
speeches," I said. "And in these parts con- 
fine yourself to facts and reason. Make only 
the concluding part emotional. Thus you 
will cut down the flow of your adrenal to a 
more normal degree." 

He did so and seemed upon the way to 

recovery. He stopped drinking and ap- 
14 201 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

peared to be getting a fresh grip and a new 
enjoyment out of life. Then came the 
break. 

A committee of his congregation waited 
upon him — men who laughed and cried and 
were thrilled by him, but knew nothing of 
the torture of adrenal poisoning, for they 
did not hear all his speeches. 

"Doctor Blank," they said, "you're tired. 
You are losing your punch. We have de- 
cided to give you a year's vacation." 



\ 



XV 

MENTAL GLOSSARY 

OVER the five great highways of the 
senses man's mental traffic with the 
outside world is continually flowing. Not a 
second of his waking life passes without some 
fresh consignment of perceptions reaching 
his brain by the road of touch or smell or 
sight or hearing or taste. Immediately upon 
delivery the mind sets to work upon this new 
material, accepts, examines, and then turns 
to that great index, the memory, where it 
has listed the nature and effect of all earlier 
impressions. 

What then ensues depends upon the in- 
formation already filed away on the subject 
at hand. Over the highway of smell, for 
example, an impression reaches the brain. 
In the passage of a fraction of a second the 
mind pulls open the index of recollection, 
examines the data already filed away on this 
particular odor, and acts. 

"That is the smell of broiling beefsteak," 

it may determine. "Beefsteak I find listed 

203 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

here as good to eat, pleasant to the taste, 
and filling to the body." 

If man obeys the impulse then awakened 
he will dine on beefsteak. If it again grati- 
fies his taste and satisfies his hunger he .files 
away the confirmatory information thus ob- 
tained under the head of "beefsteak" in his 
memory. If, on the other hand, his meal 
disagrees with him, gives him cramps, pro- 
duces nausea, information of a wholly dif- 
ferent sort is listed in that particular sub- 
division of his memory index for future use. 

The next time the odor of broiling steak 
is brought to his mind man will discover in 
his memory index contradictory evidence. 
The weight of the testimony will be in favor of 
eating the steak, however, and he will 
probably obey. If it sickens him a second 
time and a third, eventually, when the smell 
of broiling steak reaches his consciousness 
the things that he discovers in his file of 
recollection concerning it will make him 
shudder and shrink. 

Upon this general formula, set forth above 
in its simplest terms, the mind of man 
operates in response to every impression 
brought to it from the outside world. 

First, the reception of the stimulus over 
one of the five roads of the senses, then the 

reference to the file where has been stored 

204 



MENTAL GLOSSARY 

away the record of man's dealings in the past 
with the subject at hand ; after that, response 
in accordance with the information on file, 
and finally further tabulation of the result 
of that response. 

As man's existence has become complicated 
with civilization the above process has be- 
come correspondingly complex, though basic- 
ally it does not vary. Always there is the 
reference to the memory index and the final 
verdict of, "I want," or, "I don't want" — 
the manifestation, in one form or another, 
of desire or fear. 

Upon these two fundamental emotions is 
based the science of psychoanalysis in its 
pure sense. It grapples with the fear or 
desire that is hounding man and attempts 
to audit and revise the material stored away 
in his file of memory that inspires these 
obsessions. 

Pure psychoanalysis is predicated upon the 
emotional side of life. That is the pragmatic 
statement of its purpose. Yet specifically, 
there can be no pure science in this world of 
ours; the mind cannot admit of one phe- 
nomenal thing bearing no relation to other 
phenomenal things. By pragmatism, how- 
ever, we may temporarily disregard the 
relationship that one science bears to an- 
other, and thus segregate for the purpose of 

205 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

study pure mathematics, pure philosophy, 
pure logic. 

Yet when we attempt this segregation a 
prejudice of mind is bound to appear in 
every individual. This is so formidable that 
sometimes it seems almost impossible for the 
human to attain standard conclusions, since 
each of us is dominated so greatly by per- 
sonal or, as it might be called, flesh ex- 
periences. These determine to a large ex- 
tent the value of our thoughts. Whether 
we will or not, we place our chief reliance, 
not on the clear truth of pure science, but 
upon the testimony that each of us finds in 
his own particular memory file. Freud first 
voiced this fact and thereby made his 
greatest contribution to psychoanalysis. 

Man's experience — the material he has 
listed and classified in his index of recollec- 
tion — is his foremost guide and mentor in his 
attitude toward and conduct in life. And 
since the experience of any two men is 
widely divergent, we find two minds looking 
at the same thing with widely differing 
emotions. 

Two patients of mine were once beset 
with dreams of being shut up in a room 
papered and furnished in red. To one I said : 

"Now while you were in this beautiful 



room — " 



206 



MENTAL GLOSSARY 

" Beautiful !" he interrupted. "Who said 
it was beautiful? It was horrible. It was 
red, I told you." 

Later I remarked to the other dreamer, 
"Concerning this horrible room you were 



in— " 



"Horrible!" he broke in. "What ever 
gave you that idea? It was beautiful. It 
was red." 

IJHere is the essence of the problem which 
psychoanalysis is called upon to handle. 
Each of us carries knowledge of himself and 
his experiences in the glossary, or index, or 
file of memory. This glossary is man's 
record of his contact with life and upon what 
it already contains he bases to a large extent 
his present conduct and his philosophy. 

But it must also be recognized that the 
entries written into this glossary by man 
during his own tenure of life are only a few 
pages of the whole great conduct-determin- 
ing volume. Most of its leaves we inherit, 
and upon them our ancestors for thousands 
upon thousands of years have scrawled their 
own impressions of what they believed 
through experience to be the truth of 
existence. 

Our own conscious recollection extends 

over a few score of years. Behind this, in 

our memory file, are listed the rules of con- 

207 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

duct laid down by our forefathers since the 
beginning of existence. These we can never 
wholly visualize, never wholly be free from. 
Folded away in our brains, hidden in our 
tissues, and coursing through our veins are 
histories reaching back to the birth of the 
creature that eventually became man. Each 
differs widely from every other because of the 
divergent paths by which each man has 
struggled up the steep slope of evolution. 
Each holds material quite as prejudicial to 
our good conduct as the secrets locked up 
in the seeds of trees and flowers. 

In proof of this observe how two infants 
that are practically identical physically will 
react with the widest possible divergence to 
the same stimulus. A noise will make one 
scream with terror. The same sound re- 
peated to the other will make him smile and 
gurgle with delight. For each the pages on 
which each will write his own memory 
glossary are white and untouched. The 
response of each has been dictated by some 
ancestor dead perhaps a thousand years. 

The average man looks at a cat without 

fear or violent emotion of any kind. Yet 

there are some persons to whom the presence 

of the harmless animal induces hysteria. If 

we were able to spread open the great 

memory index in which the forefathers of the 

208 



MENTAL GLOSSARY 

terrified one have written we should dis- 
cover the reason for this apparently unreason- 
ing fear. 

It was my good fortune to be with my 
little nephew on two occasions when he 
responded to experiences entirely new to 
him in this life. He was then eight months 
old. 

His two brothers were playing about the 
nursery in their irresponsible, destructive 
Archaic way of lads of five and nine. In 
their romping they overturned a table. A 
bowl of goldfish, a pitcher of water, and an 
iron electric heater stood upon it. The 
crash was mighty and I looked at the baby 
in his bassinet, expecting to see his face 
contorted with fright and hear a shriek of 
terror. He lay where it was impossible for 
him to have seen what had happened. His 
eyes could not explain the appalling sound 
that his ears had received. But he did not 
cry. His whole attitude was of delight. He 
clapped his hands and laughed in that whole- 
hearted way that is so delightful in infants. 

Nothing remarkable in that? Possibly 
not, but, as with many other things in psychic 
life, the true significance of the child's con- 
duct was brought out only by a comparison 
with his action under other circumstances. 

A few days later I was again sitting beside 

209 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

him while he was intensely occupied with 
examining his toes and fingers. Suddenly 
the child, who had gurgled joyfully at the 
mighty crash of the overturned table, heard 
another comparatively insignificant sound. 

One of his brothers had been playing on the 
roof of the house and had dropped a marble 
down the chimney, ending in the fireplace 
of the room where he lay. There was only 
the rattle of the falling sphere, the hiss of 
dislodged soot, and the thud of landing — not 
an alarming noise at all when judged by 
present-day standards. 

Yet the baby's fright was pitiful. The 
color left his face. His eyes started and he 
fell to trembling and finally to screaming 
with fright — he who had heard the resound- 
ing crash of the overturned table with every 
manifestation of delight. 

What page of his ancestral glossary had 
been flung open at the noise to strike terror 
into the heart of a little child too newly 
entered upon this life to have learned of 
himself the emotion of stark fear ? 

His recollection had inspired this, not the 

thing we mean when we use that word 

loosely, but a recollection, a memory of 

something that had happened in that baby's 

dark journey upward, long before his most 

remote known ancestor was born. 

210 



MENTAL GLOSSARY 

It is manifestations of this sort upon which 
psychoanalysis fastens and attempts to wrest 
therefrom the ultimate truth. The science 
is still in its earliest stages. Gradually it is 
accumulating data and methods of operation 
that presage more tremendous results in the 
future than any already attained. Prac- 
tically, psychoanalysis attempts to mark 
down and examine the divergencies in the 
mind action and life formula of the in- 
dividual from those of the herd. 

It is these partings of the ways between 
individual and group thought for which the 
psychoanalyst is searching. In his work he 
attempts to find when, in the life of a man 
or of his ancestors, the event took place 
which made him look upon certain of the 
normal phenomena of life in an abnormal 
way. He attempts to find, in searching the 
patient's memory glossary, the exact spot 
where the entry was made that has caused 
this abnormal outlook on life. And, having 
found this entry, he endeavors by the institu- 
tion of new ideals and life theories in his 
patient's mind to erase the entry and bring 
the individual memory glossary more into 
harmony with that of the herd. 

These new ideals may be instilled by sug- 
gestion, by an appeal to the man's logic, or 
in some cases by explaining to him just when 

211 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

and how the irregular entry in the mind 
glossary was made. 

Pursuit of these entries has a marvelous 
fascination. The true inwardness of psycho- 
analysis is only beginning to be known. It 
may be only a few generations before one 
may venture in mind examination beyond 
the life span of the individual, far back 
through those pages of his glossary that were 
written by remote ancestors and inherited by 
him. Day by day the trail is being cleared 
and pioneers are advancing farther into the 
wilderness. 

It is not at all beyond the bounds of 
human possibility, for example, that the 
single instance of infant conduct mentioned 
above may not be used by psychologists in 
the future as a signpost pointing the way to 
still buried treasures of knowledge. It may 
be that from a single phenomenon of this 
sort science may trail back the person in 
whom it occurred, step by step, to his 
earliest beginning. Not as a species — science 
has already accomplished that — but as an 
individual. 

Some day individual man, by manifesting 
his recollected experiences, may be followed 
back through all his history to the geographic 
location of the root from which he has sprung, 
and to the first creature, his ultimate ancestor. 

212 



MENTAL GLOSSARY 

Take, for example, the case just men- 
tioned of the baby that showed no fear, but 
every sign of delight, at the crash of the 
falling table and shattered glass, yet was 
terror-stricken at the comparatively mild 
sound of the marble hissing and rattling down 
the chimney. If we knew more of the 
sounds peculiar to various parts of the world 
during the different ages of development, 
might we not at once throw new light upon 
this phenomenon? Might we not be able 
to fix with a fair degree of definiteness the 
exact dwelling place of this ancestor who 
wrote the page in the glossary of memory 
that caused the child to scream at the sound 
of the falling marble and laugh at a far 
more portentous sound? Might we not 
also be able to determine the approximate 
time of his existence ? 

Freud subscribes to this doctrine. In 
fact I believe it was he who first formulated 
it. He has held as fact that the conduct of 
many psychopaths admitted of no more 
plausible explanation than the one hitherto 
given — a mental return to original environ- 
ments. For the further pursuit of this 
inexhaustible line of research he urges the 
reading of Fraser's Golden Bough, a most 
amazing study of the varying development 

of the human, psychically, socially, re- 

213 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

ligiously, under the compelling influence of 
geographical locations. 

Along these lines let us develop the case 
of my nephew a.- little farther. The crash of 
falling things was a joy to him. If to-day 
science were equipped to follow this through to 
its source we would possibly find that through 
the memory bequeathed him by his ancestors 
he was fa miliar with the crash of falling trees in 
a tropical forest brought down by storm or by 
the hand of his forefather and his fellows. 

But why should this give him pleasure? 
What might the fallen tree mean to the man 
of ages gone who bequeathed the baby this 
recollection? Bark for his boat, perhaps; 
wood for weapon handles, bows and arrows 
and dwellings, fuel for his fires — all desirable 
things. Thus the crash of the falling tree 
led this unknown ancestor to smile with 
delight, as the baby smiled. 

And why should the rattle of the falling 
marble and the hiss of soot that accom- 
panied it cause the baby to open his inherited 
glossary of memory to a page where he read 
something that terrified him? 

The sound was not unlike the rattle and 

hiss of a venomous snake and there was a 

time in the history of our struggle up toward 

civilization when the serpent was among the 

foremost of our enemies. 

214 



MENTAL GLOSSARY 

Suppose we let these hypotheses stand and 
see what proof of their truth we can draw 
from him. We have tentatively established 
that somewhere, ages gone, the forbears of 
this baby lived in land heavily forested, 
where snakes were a constant menace. From 
this we may deduce that they belonged to a 
tropical race — dark-eyed, brunet-skinned, up- 
turned of nose, and high of forehead. 

My nephew is now five years old. The 
above is an accurate description of him. 
With fair confidence we may now add 
"Q. E. D." to our earlier conjectures. 



XVI 

PARALLELISM 

" AS a man thinketh in his heart so is he." 

ii To this psychological truth we may- 
add the equally correct corollary, "As a man 
is so thinketh he in his heart." 

Let this mark the starting place of our 
new quest during which we grope back into 
the murk of man's beginning once more, there 
to search for the ancestry of that close rela- 
tionship between the mental and physical in 
man which science has termed Parallelism of 
mind and body. 

Through the doctrine of evolution we have 
discovered a pragmatic explanation of the 
growth of living material through the ages 
into that highest manifestation of life — 
humanity. We can catch glimpses of the 
splendid upward procession that passed 
through the millions of years from the glow- 
ing life spark of the protozoan up to man of 
to-day. 

We know how generation after generation 

has handed the torch of progress on to the 

216 



PARALLELISM 

next advancing rank ; now Nature, stern and 
just mistress of us all, has lifted man from 
the slime and, by ages of enforcement of 
that grim rule, the survival of the fittest, 
has formed his body, molded and altered it, 
and finally given to the world man as he is 
to-day. 

So much for the physical side. But in 
that life seed of protoplasm which is man's 
furthermost ancestor there slumbered, not 
only his body as it is to-day, but also the 
germ of the human mind. And while the 
body was fighting its way up the ladder of 
evolution, the mind was also struggling, both 
battling shoulder to shoulder in their common 
cause. 

Man did not achieve the threshold of 
civilization and then suddenly, through di- 
vine intervention, receive a mind. His body 
has been the house of his intellect since the 
beginning. Side by side they have grown, 
have been fused and welded and intermingled, 
one with the other, until to-day man's body 
and mind are inseparable — not only in- 
separable, but comrades wholly dependent 
upon each other. Your physical body could 
furnish so excellent a dwelling place for no 
other mind than your own. Your own in- 
tellect could find no other mansion that 

fitted it so perfectly. The house of flesh and 
15 217 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

bone and sinew, which the ages have built 
for your mind, is its own peculiar habitation. 

Is it, then, so startling and bizarre a state- 
ment that one may read from the appearance 
of the individual the general trend of his 
thought and determine with fair accuracy 
his position in life and the type of his 
intellect? 

Science had recognized the interlocking of 
mind and body accomplished through the 
aeons of evolution. It has termed this union 
of concept and action, Parallelism. 

I have gone into this metaphysical side of 
life, not with the idea of discovering for the 
world hidden truths, but merely for the pur- 
pose of establishing, if possible, a tentative 
working basis for the study of the connection 
between our mental and physical life. 

Some persons recognize this union and co- 
operation between mind and body as the 
voice of God. "I shall not do this," they 
say, "because my soul tells me it is not 
right/' 

Another places the drive of Parallelism on 
a lower plane. "I won't do it," he says. 
"I don't like it." 

These and a hundred other manifestations 
of this same mental and physical co-operation 
must be grouped under a general formula to 
be studied scientifically. The formula is 

218 



PARALLELISM 

pragmatic. It belongs in the twilight realm 
of science — that territory to which theories 
not yet tested sufficiently to be hailed as 
truth are consigned. 

Parallelism is still a twilight formula. It 
may finally be thrown aside as inadequate to 
the subject at hand, but until it is scrapped 
it serves its purpose of advancing knowledge 
by scientific means. 

Man, when he had achieved comprehen- 
sion of the simpler physical phenomena with 
which his early existence was surrounded, 
reached out mentally to cope with those 
more complex problems — gravity, light, and 
heat, centrifugal and centripetal force. In 
the terms of these simpler things with which 
he had already established acquaintance he 
sought to build up formulas whereby he might 
achieve an understanding of these mysteries. 

Thus he said, "Gravity is a great pulling 
force situated in the center of the earth." 
He has never seen that pulling force. He 
has never seen the center of the earth. Yet 
without some such twilight formula the force 
of gravity must always have remained to him 
an insoluble mystery. 

"Physical sensation," he said, "is the 

effect of apposition carried to the brain 

through a nerve tract." What could be 

more ambiguous than this phraseology? 

219 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Yet upon this twilight formula as a founda- 
tion man has erected splendid scientific 
discoveries. 

So it is with Parallelism. We hold to 
this pragmatic formula as a means of linking 
mental and physical life and studying their 
phenomena — man's conduct in life. Whether, 
in their partnership, the mind or the body 
holds the dominating place is outside the 
sphere of our consideration. All we attempt to 
do is to recognize the interlocking of the phys- 
ical and mental and their interdependence. 

Throw consideration of this interlocking 
device aside and we are plunged back a 
thousand years into the intolerance and 
brutality of the past, when man punished 
his fellow for being unable to do what he 
himself could accomplish. 

"Says he can't stand working at a desk 
eight hours a day," the Archaic and unen- 
lightened employer exclaims. " He's a loafer, 
that's what he is. Of course he can stand 
it. Look at me. I've done it for the last 
twenty years. Fire him." 

The fact that he himself is of the brunet, 
conceptual type, while the clerk he is damn- 
ing as a loafer is blond, with a slanting fore- 
head and a bumped nose, means nothing to 
the employer. Psychologists who are fol- 
lowing through the twilight formula of 

220 



PARALLELISM 

Parallelism in its application to life may in 
time bring man to a more reasoning and 
charitable attitude toward his fellow. 

For no man speaks with the voice of his 
mind alone, any more than any action that 
he undertakes can be purely physical. The 
partnership of mind and body is insoluble. 
They endure, and because they have endured 
since the beginning of man's life the action 
of man can be nothing but the physical 
duplication of his mental concept. 

I have a relative whose physical and 
mental conduct are striking examples of this 
Parallelism. His conversation, at first in- 
teresting, becomes in time an exhausting 
thing to follow. He is more concerned with 
the by-paths of thought than he is with the 
attainment of the objective which first 
prompted him to speak. 

He is by no means a fool. His education 
has been good and his ideas are excellent. 
But they get him nowhere. No sooner does 
he begin to talk on one theme than he comes 
to a crossroad of thought, leading to another 
topic. He hesitates, loses the thread of his 
discourse, and heads off toward another ob- 
jective, only to desert this as a third comes 
into view. 

To this there is a physical parallel. No 

one who knows him well will ever take a walk 

221 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

with him. For if he starts to walk across 
town, for example, he will hesitate on each 
corner, look up and down the street, and 
probably head off at right angles to the course 
he was hitherto pursuing. A stroll with him 
is bound to be a series of hesitations and 
changes of course until his companion is 
physically weary or entirely out of patience. 

Those who have undertaken business ven- 
tures with him have experienced the same 
exasperation and final disgust, for he pursues 
the same tactics even here. 

In addition to the analogy between the 
wandering conversation and the aimless 
method of walking of my relative there is still 
a third evidence of Parallelism — his features. 
The physiognomist need never hear him 
speak nor see him walk to learn the cast of 
his mind. It is stamped on his face. Our 
characters are written on the faces of all of 
us. The body that houses the mind no more 
conceals the condition of its tenant than does 
the dwelling that protects our bodies hide from 
the world our financial and social condition. 

I advanced this theory some time ago at a 
dinner. A famous cartoonist, also a guest, 
contested my assertions. In refutation of 
my claim that physiognomies were labels 
that displayed the characters of their owner 
he undertook to draw a prize fighter with a 

222 



PARALLELISM 

prominent forehead, a short, shallow turned- 
up nose, and a receding chin. 

But when the sketch was completed and 
I challenged him to let it be published over 
his own name he gave in and admitted de- 
feat. In like manner we discussed a number 
of physical and mental paralleling charac- 
teristics. He sketched the piano mover and 
the artist, the horse trainer and the mathema- 
tician, the sailor and the philosopher, and 
finally confessed that their physiognomies 
were not interchangeable, that the body was, 
after all, the physical parallel of the mind 
that inhabited it. 

Yet although the ages have designed and 
fashioned and interlocked the body and mind 
of man, there is one mighty drive in the latter 
half of his being which, so far as psychologists 
have been able to determine, seems to have 
leaped into existence, full-armed, like Pallas 
Athene. And it is this force, peculiar to man 
alone, which has lifted him, mind and body, 
from the estate of the ape, to which he 
probably had advanced before he acquired it 
— the tremendous urge of the desire To Be 
Great, the insatiable hunger for achievement 
and recognition which is more nearly a pure 
psychic force than any other I know. It 
stands alone, without evolutionary back- 
ground. 

223 



XVII 

DREAMS AND THE ARCHAIC 

SOCIETY — that vast preponderance of 
humanity whose waking actions and 
thoughts are limited for the most part to the 
expediencies of herd life — long since gave a 
half-scornful title to those rare persons not 
wholly bound to the wheel of conscious logic. 
Poets, painters, playwrights, sculptors, in- 
ventors — all those whose method of thought 
differed from the method of the herd — 
society looked at them half pityingly and 
called them " dreamers." 

Psychology has since considered this char- 
acterization and found it, not an epithet, but 
truth. That quality of mind, that "creative 
imagination" that lifts a man here and there 
above the level of his fellows, which gives 
him an insight, a gift of exposition and 
presentation which they themselves lack; 
that quality which brings upon a man the 
title of "genius" or "nut," according to its 
content — is truly of the stuff of dreams. 

The lives and thoughts of most of us are 

224 



DREAMS AND THE ARCHAIC 

governed almost entirely during our waking 
hours by our conscious minds. And these 
are schooled and trained by the experiences 
of this life to conform to the demands of herd 
life. All conscious thought must face the 
question, "Is it expedient to our well-being, 
to our success, to our fellows in the herd?" 

Rarely, save in the hours of sleep, does the 
unconscious mind, that Archaic quality that 
has lived since the birth of the first man, 
obtain supremacy. Normally the uncon- 
scious comes into contact with present-day 
life only through a compromise with the 
conscious mind, of which I spoke in an 
earlier chapter. 

In dreams, however, the unconscious mind 
exercises full sway. There it displays that 
brightness of color, that pageantry and 
splendor, that disregard for conscious logic 
based on expediency which it is forbidden to 
manifest during waking hours. 

As long ago as 1875 psychologists were be- 
ginning to recognize the wealth of imagery 
and triumphant daring of conception pos- 
sessed by this unconscious mind. In that 
year Hildebrandt said: 

"What wonderful jumps the dreamer al- 
lows himself in his chain of reasoning" — 
in his unconscious logic — "with what un- 
concern he sees the most familiar laws of 

225 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

experience " — conscious reasoning — " turned 
upside down. . . . We often multiply quite un- 
concernedly : 'three times three makes twenty' ; 
we are not at all surprised when a dog recites 
poetry for us, when a dead person walks to his 
grave, and when a rock swims on the water." 

"Out often dreams," says Freud, "nine at 
least have a seemingly absurd purpose. 
We unite in them persons or things which do 
not bear the slightest relation to one an- 
other. In the next moment, as in a kaleido- 
scope, the grouping changes to one more 
nonsensical and irrational if possible" — to 
our conscious minds — "than before. Thus 
the changing play of our sleeping minds 
continues until we awaken, put our hands 
to our heads, and ask ourselves whether we 
really still possess the faculty of rational 
imagination and thought." 

We have already dwelt upon the drives 
of conscious and unconscious minds. We 
have pictured the unconscious, the Archaic, 
as a storehouse of all the experiences of all 
our ancestors and the source of the great 
emotions that dominate life. We have shown 
the conscious mind as a creation of our 
individual lives giving us contact with the 
world, holding to the herd laws of that world, 
and driven onward by the desire for achieve- 
ment and recognition. 

226 



DREAMS AND THE ARCHAIC 

We have also discussed the truce that was 
signed between the conscious and uncon- 
scious minds at the beginning of civilization 
or herd life by the terms of which a Psychic 
Censor became arbitrator and allowed the 
Archaic expression through the conscious, 
but only in terms conformable with the 
exigencies of herd life. 

So it has been since the dawn of human 
culture. To each part of the mind has been 
allotted a sphere of supremacy. In our 
waking hours the conscious, schooled in the 
logic of the present, driven by the desire 
To Be Great, predominates and permits the 
Archaic to express itself only as a servant 
to that desire. 

In slumber the unconscious, although still 
dominated by the Psychic Censor, is the 
ruler. Into its territory while we sleep the 
conscious mind comes suing for aid, seeking 
through the dreams of the Archaic mind sur- 
cease from problems and starvations which 
it has not been able to overcome in the wak- 
ing hours of its own supremacy. 

So in our conscious life, the unconscious 

desire is forever being held up by the traffic 

officer of herd expediency. Each vehicle 

of thought is inspected by this agent and 

allowed to proceed if it complies with the 

demands of the desire To Be Great and with 

227 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

the laws of civilization or turned back if its 
contents is not in accordance with standards 
of twentieth-century culture. Thus, the 
closer our contact with the herd, the more 
we obey and adhere to the tenets of civiliza- 
tion, the less opportunity in our waking life 
does the Archaic get for that activity we call 
" creative imagination.'* 

A century ago Schiller, by force of his own 
creative faculty, set forth in a letter to a 
friend this truth which psychologists of 
recent years have been elaborating. His 
friend had complained of his inability to 
exercise his imagination. The great Ger- 
man poet wrote in reply : 

"The reason for your complaint lies, it 
seems to me, in the constraint which your 
intelligence" — the flow of the conscious mind 
—"imposes upon your imagination" — the 
unconscious mind. 

"I must here make an observation and 
illustrate it by an allegory. It does not 
seem beneficial and it is harmful for the 
creative work of the mind if the intelligence 
inspects too closely the ideas already pouring 
in, as it were, at the gates. 

"Regarded by itself, an idea may be very 
trifling and very adventurous, but it perhaps 
becomes important on account of one which 
follows it; perhaps in a certain connection 

228 



DREAMS AND THE ARCHAIC 

with others which may seem equally absurd 
it is capable of forming a very useful xon- 
struction. The intelligence" — the conscious 
mind — "cannot judge all these things if it 
does not hold them steady long enough to see 
them in connection with the others. 

" In the case of a creative mind, however, the 
intelligence has withdrawn its watchers from 
the gates; the ideas rush in pell-mell" — from 
the million years' experience of the uncon- 
scious — "and it is only after that that the great 
heap is looked over and critically examined. 

"Messrs. Critics, or whatever else you 
may call yourselves, you are ashamed or 
afraid of the momentary and transitory mad- 
ness which is found in all creators and whose 
longer or shorter duration distinguishes the 
thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your 
complaint about barrenness; for you reject 
too soon and discriminate too severely." 

So it is that the inspiration, the genius, the 
hallucination — -whatever one chooses to call 
it — that besets the creative among man is 
actually of the stuff of dreams. It is the rare 
ability of certain men to rummage through 
the storage house of all humanity's experi- 
ences — the Archaic, unconscious mind — in 
their waking hours, while the rest of us do 
our rummaging in the murk and quick for- 

getfulness of dreams. 

229 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Pragmatically, the operation of the con- 
scious and unconscious minds is not unlike the 
mechanism of an automobile. The Archaic 
mind is the engine; the conscious, the clutch, 
gears, and transmission. During our waking 
life the clutch is thrown in and the power of 
the engine, the Archaic, is carried through 
the conscious to aid in its pursuit of great- 
ness, as the power of the motor in the au- 
tomobile transmitted to the rear wheels 
drives the car forward. 

Throw out the clutch and the engine races 
free. Throw off the domination of the con- 
scious mind in our waking life and the 
Archaic speeds up to unusual activity and 
gives us waking dreams, imparts to us crea- 
tive imagination. 

But what are the steps in this procedure? 
How can man consciously stimulate his 
imagination ? 

Clearly it must be in the establishment of 
some method in our waking life whereby the 
unconscious flow of thought may find an 
unimpeded release. The clutch of the mind 
motor must be thrown out so that the engine 
may race. 

What is it that on our awakening starts 

the conscious mind's activity? What is it 

in our babyhood that set it to work ? 

Conscious thought in our infancy grew out 

230 



DREAMS AND THE ARCHAIC 

of the continual reception of physical stimuli 
through the five great channels of the senses. 
Conscious memory, at birth, began to classify 
these. As the classification glossary grew 
under the repeated impact of sensory stimuli 
the mind was furnished through that glos- 
sary with material for comparison. 

A blow, a draught of air, the sight or smell 
or the sound of a thing, was compared with 
previous similar manifestations, and from 
the testimony of these, listed in the glossary 
of conscious memory, a conclusion was es- 
tablished and thrust into our conscious 
minds in terms of reason. 

From birth to death the glossary con- 
tinues to grow and conscious thought is 
furnished with an ever-increasing back- 
ground. When we open our eyes in the 
morning the first gleam of light, the first 
sound, sets the conscious mind at work. 
Throughout all our waking hours it con- 
tinues, fed and stimulated by the sensory 
messages brought to it along the five great 
channels whereby we keep in touch with the 
world about us. 

All of these stimuli and the response that 
we return, following consultation of our 
memory glossaries, are critically examined 
by the Psychic Censor — that guardian whose 
duty it is to keep us in harmony with the 

231 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

laws and conventions of herd life. Were it 
not for his domination man would slip in 
twenty-four hours from the height of culture 
he has attained back into the gloom of his 
early savagery. 

Our first steps in seeking slumber are 
merely the shutting off, in so far as we are 
consciously able to do so, of the channels 
along which the messages of the world out- 
side come to us. 

We go to a quiet room and cut off to a 
great extent the traffic along the highway of 
hearing. We climb into a soft bed, between 
smooth coverings, and deaden the sense of 
touch. We close our eyes and block com- 
pletely the most delicate conveyor of physical 
phenomena. The senses of taste and smell 
are likewise deadened. 

Thus in preparation for slumber, for the 
eight hours in which the Archaic mind 
dominates through dreams, we aid him in 
coming into his kingdom by exclusion of 
those physical phenomena which during our 
waking life keep him in the background. 

We shut out the world of the present and 

immediately begin to feed upon our inherited 

memories of the past through which our 

fathers lived and compiled the memory 

glossaries which have been handed down 

to our own Archaic minds. 

232 



DREAMS AND THE ARCHAIC 

We throw out the clutch and the engine 
races. First we are swept into the strange, 
wandering thoughts of drowsiness, then into 
complete slumber, filled with the pageantry 
of dreams. These go on continually through 
our sleeping hours. What man may call 
"dreamless sleep" is merely his inability 
to recollect in his conscious mind what has 
' been going on in his unconscious. 

Bearing in mind the process which we 
adopted in surrendering ourselves to sleep, 
man may by a similar method seek to gain 
in his waking hours material from that great 
well of the creative faculty, the Archaic 
mind. He may deliberately stimulate his 
imagination, be it ever so sluggish, by lying 
down comfortably in a quiet, darkened room 
and closing his eyes. 

I have tried this time and again with my 
own patients, first asking them to speak 
their thoughts as they come in the dusk and 
quiet of the rest room. I have found that, 
by closing the doors of their senses to the 
outside world, they realize almost at once a 
series of conceptions and word pictures 
utterly foreign to their matter-of-fact, every- 
day, conscious minds. 

They have shut off the outside world suf- 
ficiently to permit them to tap the vast 

reservoir of unconscious experience. The 
16 233 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Archaic mind, fountainhead of dreams, is 
giving them this material in their waking 
hours. Through its agency they have 
achieved "creative imagination." They 
have, as Schiller puts it, withdrawn the 
"watchers from the gates" and the exotic 
traffic of the Archaic flows into their con- 
sciousness unimpeded. 

The psychologist may readily determine 
that these word pictures, painted by the 
man or woman at rest in the darkened cham- 
ber, are of the stuff of dreams. They are 
sublimations, as dreams are sublimations. 
They can be translated by the same psycho- 
logical knowledge that enables us to unravel 
and explain the allegories of dreams. 

Thus, one of my patients spoke persist- 
ently of the floating stone that his imagina- 
tion pictured before him. I found that this 
was as clearly an escapement as the same 
thing manifested in the midst of a dream 
would have been. 

He had made a mistake in business, in 
friendship, that would have been unen- 
durable had he not been able to excuse him- 
self, to himself at least. His error had lain 
in assuming that his business partner held 
all the attributes of steadfastness, solidity, 
integrity; in short, that he was fitted to be 
the corner stone of a worthy dwelling. 

234 



DREAMS AND THE ARCHAIC 

His partner betrayed his trust. When the 
flood came the corner stone floated away like 
a piece of wood. The waking dream, the de- 
ceived man's imagination, absolved him from 
all blame. Who could foresee a stone float- 
ing on the water ? 

Yet from a sublimation of this sort, a mere 
figment of imagination, what tremendous 
discoveries are made! What wild and gro- 
tesque dreams are brought to truth and ac- 
tual happening through this same quality 
of creative imagination. Concrete ships sail 
the seven seas to-day — floating stones. 

The artist, the creator, has learned to 
utilize this material of imagination to give 
to his work something that the labor of the 
purely conscious mind must lack. The crea- 
tive substances culled from the unconscious 
mind are continually being exploited in plays, 
in novels, in paintings and sculpture. 

Often it is a flash of this same apparently 
God-given imagination that lends immor- 
tality to a work that otherwise could not 
endure. Without its aid more of our novels 
and plays would be flat failures. 

The material is frequently utterly illogical 
when measured by the stern standards of 
present life. Of course the language and 
pictures, word and scenic, of current litera- 
ture and plays are by no means cast upon the 

235 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

turgid, confused models of dreams, but the 
element of imagination of the Archaic memory- 
is there to stir and rouse that same quality 
of thought in the reader or the spectator. 

Why are men and women of the twentieth 
century thrilled by some situation or crisis 
which their conscious minds tell them is 
utterly impossible under the rigors of modern 
existence ? 

Because they open the novel, or take their 
seats in the theater, after having dulled 
deliberately their critical faculty, their con- 
sciousness of twentieth-century existence. 
They read and watch, to forget, for the most 
part, the present. 

To this end they are aided by the author 
and the stage manager. The writer sees to 
it that the climax, the great outburst of his 
imagination, does not occur until he has 
developed his story gradually and carefully, 
until he has led the reader back along the 
trail to the Archaic with him. 

The theatrical director makes use of dark- 
ness and music and well-cushioned seats to 
shut off his audience as far as possible from 
conscious life. So shut off, they will accept as 
the truth statements and situations at which 
they would scoff and sneer were they to 
encounter them in the columns of a prosaic 

twentieth-century newspaper. 

236 



DREAMS AND THE ARCHAIC 

There was a play that ran with tremendous 
success in New York one season that was 
utterly ridiculous when measured by present- 
day standards. It dealt with the fortunes 
of a man who was a ground officer of an 
aviation camp, but who had never been in 
an airplane. The climax of the production 
was attained when catastrophe befell the 
camp and it became necessary for a miracu- 
lous deed to be performed high above the 
clouds. He leaped into a machine and 
soared aloft, smashing records and estab- 
lishing an Archaic hero claim beyond 
contention. 

Our conscious minds sneer at such an 
utterly impossible plot. Did the audiences 
that saw this play do so, too? 

No! They cheered and laughed and ap- 
plauded, hailing with delight that quality 
of creative imagination that constructed the 
play, because this imagination had stimu- 
lated their own, had emancipated them for a 
little while from the hard logic of the present, 
and had fed them the very stuff of dreams. 



XVIII 



ADAPTATION 



NOT long ago I rode through the Park 
with a friend who had just purchased 
a high-strung, thoroughly trained saddle 
horse. It was evident that all was not going 
well with mount and rider. The horse 
curvetted, sidled, shied, and presently my 
friend lost his temper, became red in the 
face, jerked and sawed violently at the reins, 
and raked his horse's sides with his spurs. 

The inevitable happened. The animal 
bolted for a quarter of a mile before his 
master could get him in hand again. When 
I caught up with them both were trembling 
from the effect of the emotional secretions 
that had been poured into their bodies. 

"What was the trouble?" I ventured. 

"Oh/' replied my friend, in a tone of in- 
tense exasperation, "this damned beast won't 
do what I want him to." 

The situation at the moment was much 

too tense for me to offer any comment. A 

little later, however, I suggested: 

238 



ADAPTATION 

"He has been trained for the saddle. 
Perhaps you don't know exactly how he 
was trained — what rules he has been taught 
to obey. Why not try him out carefully? 
Throw your weight forward, then back, in 
the saddle, and mark how he responds. See 
what happens when you press your legs 
against his shoulders or his flanks. Find 
out what he does when you lay your hand 
against this or the other side of his neck." 

My friend had adopted toward his horse 
the mental posture not at all uncommon in 
the attitude of many humans toward the 
world and the herd life in which they dwell. 

His philosophy of existence, for the time 
being, at least, had been boiled down to the 
Archaic cry, "I want," and he was deter- 
mined to override all obstacles to achieve 
that desire. 

In his brutal treatment of his horse he 
threw away all thought of the animal's 
feelings. He never considered that his mount 
had "I wants" of his own. Nor did he 
think that even if the sole desire of the 
horse was to comply with his master's wishes 
the master must take pains to establish some 
means of communicating these wishes clearly 
to the mind of the beast. 

In other words, my friend had not the 
experience, the self-control, to retain his 

239 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

"I want," to comprehend the "I want" of 
his horse. Immediately his conscious mind 
told him his horse was not obeying him 
properly he called upon his unconscious to 
enforce his demand. He did not try to 
solve his problem according to the laws of 
the present, but sought to drive his desire 
through by the hot emotion of the Archaic. 

His was not an isolated case. Every hour 
of the day sees his line of action duplicated 
by thousands of men who give all of their 
attention to the clamor of their immediate 
"I want" and none at all to the "wants" 
of the herd, to the tenets of the civilization 
in which they live. 

Each of us can call to mind numberless 
instances of this mental attitude seen in our 
friends and sometimes in ourselves. Long 
before Marshal Foch had evolved the military 
formula of "Attack, attack, attack" many 
of us were employing it in our everyday life. 

In warfare, which is entirely Archaic, this 
formula brings success. In our herd life, 
which has been lifted to a higher plane, it 
more often brings calamity. 

Civilization in its growth has laid down 

hard-and-fast rules of social conduct which, 

if we are to keep on even terms with our 

fellows, we must obey. He who learns and 

follows these rules most steadfastly attains 

240 



ADAPTATION 

success above his associates and earns from 
society the verdict of possessing "tact." 
He whose tempestuous "I want" will brook 
no delay, who overrides the tenets of present- 
day culture and attempts to gratify his de- 
sire by Archaic means, eventually brings 
upon himself the disastrous fate that over- 
takes anyone who breaks set rules, whether 
God or man made. He antagonizes not only 
human relationships, but the very elements 
themselves. 

Man's life is a continual struggle between 
his individual "I want" and the "I want" 
of that evolutionary, man-made mechanism 
that we call society. His ability to adjust 
his own desire to the demands of herd life 
brings him achievement and recognition. 
His inability to make this adjustment or his 
disregard of it spells disaster. 

"Your horse has his 'I want' as well as 
you," I might have said to my equestrian 
friend. "It may not be in the cerebratory 
way of your human 'I want/ but it is no 
less demanding for being in the orderly way 
of mechanistic procedure. There are certain 
rules of conduct to which he has been taught 
to adhere, as there are similar rules that 
govern the great mechanism we call 'so- 
ciety/ If you would only recognize that 

everything in this mechanistic world cries 

241 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

' I want/ whether it is animate or inanimate, 
you could, by harmonizing your own desires 
with these cries, come pretty near being the 
master of all things." 

The disastrous result of this isolated ^and 
personal "I want," working for itself with 
complete disregard for the desires of other 
individuals or the demands of herd life, may 
be clearly seen in the instance of a relative 
of mine. 

What I am about to relate is only a single 
incident of the long series of calamitous 
incidents that have punctuated the disaster- 
filled life — social and financial — of a near and 
otherwise dear kinsman. 

He called upon me when my office was 
filled with patients and immediately in- 
formed my secretary that he would be unable 
to wait his turn, but must see me at once 
upon important business. In order to em- 
phasize more clearly the tempestuous drive 
of his selfish ego, let me say that he is not 
engaged in a commercial life. 

My secretary brought me the message 
while I was conferring with a patient, and 
I instructed her to tell him that either he 
might remain and wait his proper turn or 
else come back in an hour or so or during 
my office hours in the evening. 

For a little while this held his impetuous 

242 



ADAPTATION 

"I want" in check, but not for long. Pres- 
ently there came an insistent rapping at my 
office door while I was engaged with a 
patient. I opened it and faced my relative. 
Our faces were seamed with annoyance as 
we gazed at each other. 

"Look here, old man," he said, petulantly, 
"I can't spend my whole forenoon in your 
office." 

A somewhat vigorous remark on my part 
was neglected entirely in the charge of his 
"I want" over all obstacles toward its goal. 
I started to turn away, but he had me by the 
coat sleeve. 

"I won't keep you a second. I want two 
hundred and fifty dollars for a few days. 
Just go in and write out a check and I'll 
be off." 

It was typical of his attack in all things. 
His formula of existence was always toward 
one direct end — self. Rules that governed 
the lives of other persons, tenets upon which 
herd existence was based, meant nothing to 
him. He plowed through them with as little 
regard as a tank lumbering through barbed 
wire. And, like the tank, most of the 
projectiles hurled against him in defense of 
the rules that he tramped on rebounded 
from his almost impenetrable hide. 

I refused to comply with his request, not 

243 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

that I had any fear that he would not return 
the money, but he had broken all the rules 
of my personal mechanism, and I resented it. 
He went away without the two hundred and 
fifty dollars which he most certainly would 
have attained if in the course of his life 
he had ever paused to learn the true inward 
meaning of the word "tact." 

A few days later his wife called. 

"Why do you so hurt Jim's feelings? I 
don't think you have any idea how fond he 
is of you." 

Perhaps I have not. Jim's faculty for 
creating disaster in the blind pursuit of his 
own ends keeps from him the mechanistic 
reciprocating love of others. 

So it is with all of us. The rules of this 
game of life are written so that all may read 
and learn through the school of experience. 
Some of us study them all our days — apply- 
ing them, watching with eager interest the 
result of this or that move we make to see 
if it conforms to them, trying with the best 
of our ability to become master mechanics 
of that great mechanism, human society. 

Others see nothing but the selfish end to be 
attained. Toward that they plunge for- 
ward, shattering all laws, hitting below the 
belt, kicking and gouging, violating every 

rule of the game. They may or may not 

244 



ADAPTATION 

attain the thing for which they charge like 
maddened buffaloes, but they certainly do 
achieve the hoots and hisses and jeers of 
society, which cannot endure the foul player. 

In connection with these rules Binet was 
the first to call attention to a faculty which 
few possess innately, although most human 
minds are able to take it on, once attention 
has been called to it. 

He contended that if one hundred people 
were to go to the railroad station to take a 
train and were able to see only the reflection 
of the clock in a mirror, ninety of them would 
be certain to miss it. In other words, only 
one person in ten inherits a sufficient knowl- 
edge of the mechanism of life to give him 
enough resourcefulness to cope with sud- 
denly altered conditions. 

Those who are able in the mirrored clock 
to read the true time are possessed of minds 
that have the power to see below the surface 
of things. They are capable of running back, 
in a flash, from the time the reflected hands 
indicate, to the actual face of the clock, 
unseen. They are able to grasp truths that 
lie beyond surface manifestations. They 
have the power of finding in the past the 
answer to the secrets of the present. 

My relative, Jim, had no such power of 

mind, either innate or acquired. He could 

245 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

not read the clock backward, nor had he 
the ability, it seems to me, of following 
anything but the rush of his own desire. 

Nor bad my equestrian friend the power to 
consider what had gone before in dealing 
with a present problem. He was unable to 
utilize what had happened in the past in 
considering the present. He could not give 
bygone happenings the precedence over im- 
mediate emotional drives. 

Occasionally there arise persons who have 
this ability of utilizing the past to such a 
degree that they achieve tremendous suc- 
cess in their own particular fields of endeavor, 
who either through some mysterious quality 
of inheritance or else through painstaking 
study have learned to read the past history 
of present phenomena and to govern their 
conduct accordingly. They are able to read 
the clock in the mirror. 

Herd life, or society, is a mechanism as 
truly as anything of evolutionary growth is 
a mechanism. It has developed according 
to certain laws and now stands subservient 
to these laws. These laws await the dis- 
covery of each individual born into this 
world. In his ability to learn them, to file 
them away in his memory glossary, to apply 
them, lies the secret of success. 

The man who insists on leading a purely 

246 



ADAPTATION 

Archaic, emotional life without consideration 
of the herd mechanism is doomed to disaster 
as truly as the drunken man who while 
intoxicated makes an attempt to drive an 
automobile without knowing anything of its 
construction or limitation. 

Thus my equestrian friend who attempted 
to govern his mount by emotion has since 
learned to master him by regard for and 
application of the rules under which the 
animal had been reared and trained. 

And my impetuous relative, had he studied 
the rules laid down in the past for herd de- 
velopment, might have learned to apply 
these and thus attain his ends, as one by the 
application of simple laws may learn to tell 
mirror time. 

Billy Sunday is one of those who — to pur- 
sue our allegory — has learned to read the 
clock backward with tremendous success. 
He has studied the past. He has learned 
that behind the austere ceremony of present- 
day worship lies the conception of Christ 
as a friend and helper rather than an august 
divinity. 

I once witnessed a striking example of this 
line of reasoning during the course of his 
service. Billy had finished his athletic ser- 
mon. He was putting on his coat and had 

begun to mop off his perspiring face and 

247 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

neck, preparatory to making his closing 
prayer. While still using his handkerchief 
as a towel he began in a most friendly and 
conversational way : 

"Jesus . . . Jesus . . . O Jesus, I'm tired. 
You know what I mean! ..." 

I confess that a wholly unexpected thrill 
ran through me. No doubt I felt like the 
Pharisee who came to scoff, yet remained 
to pray. It was all so different from my 
previous experiences in worship. In place of 
being conducted into the presence of an 
omnipotent and jealous master, Billy had 
turned me over to a friend, a companion, a 
chum, because he in his preaching had 
learned to read the clock in the mirror. 

In regard to the clock in the mirror I offer 
primarily as my authority for the use of such 
allegories in psychological research Vail- 
linger's Philosophy of the "As If" 

In this great work the author contends 
that all of science in its beginning was based 
upon simile and allegory; that if early man 
had not adopted the habit of regarding the 
more complex phenomena of life in terms 
of the simpler and more familiar, science 
could not have progressed or even found 
footing. 

Man said, for example, "The force of 

gravitation is 'as if a string were fastened 

248 



ADAPTATION 

to all things, pulling them down toward the 
center of the earth. " 

Throughout all his advancement and ac- 
quirement of deeper and broader knowledge 
man has continually employed this system 
of allegory to make comprehensible scientific 
concepts which otherwise must have re- 
mained unintelligible. 

In the development of his own attitude 
toward life as it is to-day man constantly em- 
ploys the "as if" to clarify his viewpoint, to 
permit him to establish his own particular for- 
mula of existence. But the difficulty is that 
each of us out of his own particular experi- 
ence is indeed enmeshed in his own particular 
fiction of the "as if." 

The man of normal mind is he whose 
similes and comparisons by which he estab- 
lishes his attitude toward life more nearly 
adhere to the "as if" of physical reality. 
On the other hand, he whose applications of 
the "as if" have led him out of reality so 
far that he is unable of himself to find his 
way back we call neurotic, hysterical, psy- 
copathic, insane, depending upon how far 
afield his experiences have led him. 
17 



XIX 

LIFE FORMULAS AND HUNGERS 

THE sea of life into which man is launched 
at birth is, as I have tried to demon- 
strate, not a waste where chance and good 
or ill fortune are the sole determining 
factors. Even as the ocean is obedient to 
the laws of the tides, of the trade-winds, of 
the wandering currents, so is the herd life 
of to-day subservient to well-established 
rules. Both are mechanisms. Each holds 
its secrets for the searcher, and upon his 
knowledge of the laws each conceals depends 
the fate of the venturer who goes down to the 
actual, or psychic, sea in ships. 

The winds that blow through the physical 
and mental worlds, the rise and fall of the 
tides, the stars by which the course is 
plotted, may stand as man's friends or 
enemies in proportion to his knowledge of 
the laws they obey. 

Too often man's life voyage is as weary 
as Ulysses', wave-buffeted, driven upon 

shoals, filled with suffering and privation, 

250 



LIFE FORMULAS AND HUNGERS 

ending dismally in some sorrowful land. 
And yet this unfortunate voyager, had he 
but known the laws by which his journey 
was governed, might have attained the 
Blessed Isles. 

For life is spread before man as the ocean 
stretches away from the shore, and it is for 
him to choose whether the days of his travel- 
ing be filled with joy and laughter or mourn- 
ing and tears. 

Daily, as each of us drives onward on his 
personal voyage, we hail and pass other 
craft, some with music and dancing on their 
decks, others wracked and torn by the winds 
of adversity. The condition of each of the 
ships we meet or overtake bespeaks elo- 
quently the ability cf the mind that directs 
her course. We can tell at a glance whether 
mind, the master, is groping through mystery 
toward some unknown port or is trium- 
phantly guiding his ship home through his 
knowledge of the laws of navigation. 

The Great Unknown which lies at the end 

of the voyage none can fathom, but the 

course we take toward that final haven may 

be dismal or joyous in accordance with the 

knowledge we possess of the laws of herd 

life — the sea through which we sail — the 

construction of our craft (the body) and of 

the engine that drives it (the mind machine). 

251 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

Man, we have learned, must have four 
things from life — the great Archaic Three, 
food and drink, shelter, and sex gratification 
— and fourth, the satisfaction of his fore- 
conscious drive for Greatness — his own par- 
ticular gift. 

From existence he must gain these four 
or he cannot live, but the manner in which 
he obtains them rests with him. He may 
gratify his hungers with a smiling face and 
a singing heart or he may proceed in the 
dismal manner of the Puritan. Which course 
he chooses rests, first, on his inheritance; 
second, on his education during the forma- 
tive period of his life; third, on his ability 
to alter the formulas obtained from these 
two sources to meet the exigencies of later 
existence — sublimation. 

The last is the greatest consideration. To 
a large extent man's happiness in life rests 
upon his adaptability, his power of changing 
his course on the sea of life to meet sudden 
crises of wind and wave. 

I have spoken in the last chapter of those 
unfortunates who seem pursued by the 
furies in that their every action brings upon 
them disaster of one sort or another. Set 
over against these who are continually being 
buffeted about, because they disregard the 

rules of life navigation, each of us can think 

252 



LIFE FORMULAS AND HUNGERS 

of people we term " lucky," whose lives 
seem an endless succession of desires gratified. 

After nearly two generations of observa- 
tion it has seemed to me that in the final 
analysis adaptability is the secret of happi- 
ness in this world. Man cannot change the 
basic laws that underlie his and the herd's 
existence, however much he may strain and 
bruise himself to overturn them. Clearly, 
since his life must be spent in the company 
of these unalterable tenets, he must adopt a 
flexible, rather than a rigid, attitude toward 
existence. He must learn that it is madness 
to fight the gods, and to gain happiness he 
must yield himself to their rulings. 

My early home life was amid rather ar- 
bitrary and dogmatic, somewhat Puritanical, 
surroundings. Next door to us lived the 
Peterson family. Often I wished that they 
would move elsewhere, for it was clear to 
me, taking my attitude from the atmosphere 
of my own home, that sooner or later the 
vengeance of the Lord would descend upon 
that evil Peterson tribe, and we lived too 
close to them for comfort in the event of 
wholesale destruction. 

For the life of the Petersons was every- 
thing that the Edson's was not. They were 
a godless crew. They played croquet on 

Sunday and actually seemed to take pleasure 

253 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

in this profanation of the Sabbath. They 
allowed wine, that mocker, to be exposed 
to public view on their sideboard. They 
went to the races and — depth of iniquity — 
played cards for money. 

The boys — whom I secretly envied — were 
as unsanctified as their elders. They had 
boats and rowed on Sunday. They had 
shotguns and went hunting when they 
pleased. In short, they and the rest of their 
family continually violated the most sacred 
laws of the Deity as the Edsons knew him. 

Hourly, while Pharisaically envying the 
Petersons, I looked for the wrath of God to 
be visited upon them in the shape of fire or 
flood, poverty or sickness, or utter annihila- 
tion. For I had been taught that all of the 
pleasures in which the family next door 
indulged were evil, and I had also been 
taught the vindictive spirit in which the 
Almighty punished the evildoer. 

Yet year after year went by and the 
wrath of an outraged Deity was still with- 
held. Two of the girls married at last, 
rather against their parents' wishes. Then 
one of the boys ran away to sea. 

"Ha-ha," I thought to myself in the spirit 
of a Cromwellian trooper, "here is the end 
of the Peterson family. Their wickedness 

has found them out." 

254 



LIFE FORMULAS AND HUNGERS 

But the girls continued to come home for 
week-ends. They reared families, struggled 
with vicissitudes, we all knew, but always, 
as far as I could see, with laughter and song. 
Horses and carriages and fine homes finally 
came to them, in utter disregard of the world 
of dogma as I had been taught to know it. 

Harry, who had run away to become a 
sailor, rose to be mate of his ship, then 
captain, and finally president of a big steam- 
ship corporation. The Peterson family in 
its wickedness continued to flourish like a 
green bay tree. 

It is needless to say that while, ethically, 
I condemned the entire family, I was often 
a willing participant in the early criminal 
life of Harry. Frequently I stole my father's 
pistol and accompanied him on his hunting 
expeditions. Sometimes we got lost in the 
woods, at which I was always tremendously 
frightened, roused, as I see now, by the belief, 
inspired by my parents, that divine punish- 
ment is ever swift on the heels of the evildoer. 

But Harry, a far starker sinner than I, was 
never alarmed. In fact, the conviction that 
he was lost seemed to be an exciting adven- 
ture to him. He at once set about to get 
his bearings, marking the position of the sun, 
the quarter from which the wind blew, the 

direction of paths, and the course of brooks. 

2ss 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

I came to the belief that the Lord would 
have a difficult job in punishing Harry for 
his many offenses, for Harry didn't seem to 
recognize disaster when he met it nor see 
the hand of God when it was raised to smite 
him. 

Such were the divergencies in the Edson 
and the Peterson schools of life conduct. 
My family, dreading the violation of the 
rules of existence, assumed a rigid and fear- 
ful philosophy, repressing, as leading toward 
such violation, many bright and wholesome 
things which, because of their very bright- 
ness, seemed to be evil. 

They substituted for the direct gratification 
of the Archaic desires a stern, dogmatic, 
repressive formula. They satisfied their de- 
sire for greatness by assuming an attitude of 
moral superiority toward their neighbors. 

These neighbors, through the clearer play 
of their unconscious logic, saw no evil in 
things that were pleasant and fleshly, just 
because they were so. They adhered to the 
basic laws of herd life, but they threw no 
unnecessary obstacles into the mental chan- 
nels through which their Archaic cravings 
found outlet. They achieved greatness in an 
easier and more natural fashion by seizing 
upon the good things of life when these 

things offered themselves. 

256 



LIFE FORMULAS AND HUNGERS 

Harry, the evildoer, led a natural life. He 
learned by experience and unconscious logic 
to navigate the sea of existence skillfully be- 
fore he went down to the actual ocean. I, 
however, whose emotional secretions were 
being continually dammed up by dogma, 
could find no easy exit for them, but gave 
them egress in tears and fright, anger and 
protest — safety valves, as might be said, of 
the unconscious. 

Thus Harry's personal craft sailed pleas- 
antly through summer seas, while mine, with 
sails reefed, struggled to round the Horn, 
and was badly battered and strained before 
its master learned to hold more closely to 
the actual laws that underlie existence, to 
remove unnecessary blockages from the paths 
of legitimate desires. 

The four great hungers of life are the en- 
gines that drive the human craft in its 
voyage. Throughout existence, one or more 
of them is at the foundation of every action, 
every conscious thought, every dream. 

Three of them, as I have pointed out, 
can be satisfied openly and at will without 
violating any of the standards that have been 
built up through the continually complexing 
herd life of man. But a fourth, the sex de- 
sire, man persists in regarding as non-existent 
in connection with his herd life. He strives 

257 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

to throttle it. He places all possible ob- 
stacles before it. He regards the greatest 
responsibility that Nature has imposed on 
him as one might look upon cancer — some- 
thing never to be spoken of, never to be 
brought into the light of day. 

You cannot block the exhaust of a physical 
engine; you cannot neglect it and maltreat 
it without obtaining disastrous results. 

Man's reaction to continual suppression 
of sex desire is as definite as would his reac- 
tion be if his Archaic demand for shelter 
were starved ; if he were unclothed and un- 
housed and forced to deal with the elements 
in his naked, unprotected state. 

But because man has placed upon the 
natural sex hunger that besets him the 
stigma of disgrace, because the herd law 
has decreed that while he may announce to 
all the world that he desires food, he must 
never, even to his closest associates, confess 
this equally important hunger, the results of 
sex starvation are generally concealed. 

The Physic Censor, arbitrator between the 
individual and the herd, often refuses to allow 
the conscious mind to recognize the stark, 
Archaic hunger of the unconscious in its re- 
volting, natural state. 

Fearing the condemnation of a civilization 

to which open recognition of these things is 

258 



LIFE FORMULAS AND HUNGERS 

anathema, the Psychic Censor resorts to 
hypocrisy, tricks out the desire in some other 
form, and permits it to come in contact 
with the world in a form in which the 
conscious mind cannot identify the latent 
material. 

In other words, man does not lead a nor- 
mal life, either physically or psychically, 
from a sex viewpoint, and the continued 
suppression of the tremendous Archaic force, 
the necessary sublimation before it can be 
recognized in our herd life, is continually re- 
sulting in disaster. 

The maltreated, neglected engine will 
wheeze and pound and backfire and eventu- 
ally wreck the creation of which it is a part. 
The blocked sex desire does a similar thing. 

Freud claims that the obstruction of sex 
gratification by the arbitrary laws of herd 
life is responsible for most of the abnormality 
and deformity that besets the psychic ex- 
istence of man. Robbed of its natural out- 
let, the force must find another. These out- 
lets, Freud says, have ranged all the way 
from murder and destruction in our Archaic 
lives to the dreams and neuroses of our 
present day. 

In support of this he presents an amazing 

array of cases in which he has traced dreams 

and phobias back to their Archaic lair and 

259 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

found crouching there that inevitable, ter- 
rific force which man tries to starve and to 
which he becomes unconsciously and in a 
thousand ways the most abject slave. 

I do not claim that primarily and intrin- 
sically the sex drive was greater and more 
powerful than the desire for sustenance and 
shelter. But we have for thousands of years 
so ordered our lives that hunger and cold 
have been regarded openly and satisfied with 
the sanction and encouragement of herd life. 

These cravings have flowed along their 
proper psychic channels unblocked. Sex 
desire has been checked and turned aside and 
dammed until by its accumulated strength it 
far outweighs the other two in present-day 
psychic importance. 

Behind the dam it has gathered and the 
stored-up force of its stream is utilized to 
turn a variety of strange and sometimes dis- 
tinctly harmful mechanisms. 

It has been my experience that the mal- 
contents and misfits of present-day existence 
— men who are unable for one reason or 
another to keep their places in the ranks 
of the advancing herd — are retarded by the 
fact that they still cling too closely to the 
Archaic means of satisfying the Archaic 
hungers, disguised, of course, as the Psychic 

Censor's knowledge permits. 

260 



LIFE FORMULAS AND HUNGERS 

Freud claims still further that once the 
psychopath has been made to see the low 
level from which his own particular obsession, 
his attitude toward life has sprung, the ob- 
session immediately "crumbles away/' 

That has not been my experience nor the 
experience of many other writers and ob- 
servers in psychologic research work. The 
Archaic lusts are too mighty and immortal 
for man to turn them on or off at will, as he 
might a faucet. They are too deeply rooted 
in humanity for man to tear them out. 
Matters of this sort do not "crumble away" 
in the sense that they vanish into thin air. 
You cannot melt up or blow away the 
Archaic drives. They cannot and will not 
stand any such eradicating process. 

But for the false and harmful conception 
which is making a normal man a neurotic 
the psychoanalyst can substitute another, 
not harmful. The original conception is 
merely the individual's attempt to sub- 
limate his Archaic desire, to find a relief 
for it. 

The psychologist's problem, in this in- 
stance, is not to explain the matter to the 
patient and watch the concept "crumble 
away," but to guide the Archaic drive into 
some other channel, more nearly in con- 
formity with standardized herd escapement. 

261 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

I have treated many neurotics and alco- 
holics. In many instances I have been suc- 
cessful in showing them how to achieve their 
Archaic demands at a less objectionable and 
expensive level than through alcoholic de- 
bauches. But never have I seen the matter 
"crumble away" into nothingness. It has 
always been through the process of substitu- 
tion that success has been achieved — by 
turning the flow of the Archaic desire into 
another and more profitable course from the 
viewpoint of, first, mechanistic necessity, then 
of herd expediency. 



XX 

BRAIN PATTERNS AND THE CHEMISTRY 
OF ACTION 

WE have followed man back through the 
cavern of unnumbered years to that 
unimaginably distant point where that first 
faint stir in the blackness proclaimed that the 
seed of all life had been planted on this planet. 

From that first, mysteriously formed fleck 
of protoplasm, we have striven to trace the 
terrific upward climb of what is now the hu- 
man mind. We have spanned depthless 
chasms with the bridge of pragmatism. We 
have soared over impregnable heights on the 
wings of hypotheses. 

Bit by bit we have articulated a model of 

the human mind machine; not necessarily 

what it is, but rather what it may be. To the 

psychologist of a thousand years hence, 

present-day theories of mind construction 

may be laughable. All that we can say now 

is that we have built them in accordance 

with the laws of life as we knew them; that 

we have created them in harmony with our 

knowledge of logic. 

263 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

So our tentative model of the human 
mental mechanism stands before us, and 
after our groping fashion we have learned 
something of how this hypothetical engine 
functions. On a foundation of pragmatism 
we have evolved certain unrefuted theories 
concerning the common conduct of humanity. 
In other words, we have dwelt hitherto on 
the traditional, the legal aspect of the science 
of mind construction and functioning. 

But science that goes no farther than this 
is still-born. There are three aspects of the 
subject that must be covered. Hitherto we 
have dwelt upon only two. We have con- 
cerned ourselves solely with thfe evolutionary 
growth of the mind — its past — and with its 
construction and workings — its present. We 
now face the third and greatest aspect of the 
subject — its future. 

We are face to face with that portion of a 
science that H. G. Wells terms "the legisla- 
tive." On the bases of the past and present 
we must erect a tentative structure in con- 
formity with the general outline and archi- 
tecture of this foundation. 

We Have groped in the past and read by the 
flickering light of human comprehension the 
trail left by humanity in its upward struggle. 
From our knowledge of the laws that gov- 
erned that long, long track from darkness 

264 



BRAIN PATTERNS 

toward the light, of the formulas established 
by consistently reiterated action, we can at 
least venture to predict a future; to prophesy 
what the farther upward course will be. 

Throughout the generations to come, the 
world is to witness the collapse of mystery 
after mystery under the impact of laws. It 
is to see the reclamation of many things here- 
tofore attributed to a careless sweep of the 
hand of God and their incorporation in the 
realm of logic. 

Consider for a moment, by way of illustra- 
tion, the " mystery " of leadership. What is it 
that impels men to follow and, if need be, die 
for one individual, and hoot at the suggestion 
of another that they do his work or his fight- 
ing for him ? 

The leader of men has been loosely called 
a genius or an accident. Already the world 
is beginning to catch a glimmer of the truth 
that he is actually an expert in herd reactions, 
an intuitive psychologist. 

Is it any more amazing that a man may 
know instinctively how the common run of 
men react to certain stimuli than it is that 
another, with no acquired knowledge of 
music, may sit at a pianoforte and pick out 
melodies ? 

The latter takes a creation of wood, felt, 
and steel, created by master craftsmen in 

18 265 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

accordance with the laws of music, and is 
able to make it respond in harmony with 
those laws by grace of the inherited adapta- 
bility packed away in his unconscious mind 
by a thousand ancestors. 

The man with a gift for leadership has in- 
herited a knowledge of how society, that 
machine created by the master of all crafts- 
men, will respond to certain stimuli in ac- 
cordance with unvarying laws. Instinctively 
he exerts this knowledge and draws thou- 
sands shouting in his train. 

The mechanics of the human reaction to 
stimuli have already been established by lab- 
oratory experiment. It is known that the 
activating force of mentality is a power 
akin to electricity, JS not actually that 
mysterious fluid. 

It is also presumed that the materials 
which generate this force — the chemicals 
whose reaction bring it into being — are " the 
chromaffin bodies — derived from the adrenals 
— and brain protoplasm." But whatever the 
activating force, it flows through the great 
nerve trunks of the spine and thence to the 
glands that harbor the essence of emotions 
—the adrenals, the liver, the thyroid. These 
pour their content into the blood, and the 
force of thought is finally transformed into 

bodily response toward fear or desire. 

266 



BRAIN PATTERNS 

These matters are described with remark- 
able clarity and logic in Dr. George W. 
Cryle's monumental work, The Origin and 
the Nature of the Emotions. 

Two things must be borne in mind in con- 
sideration of the mechanism of thought and 
its resultant action : 

First, thought and action are entirely 
separate processes, although they are devised 
to interlock. Thought is a force set in 
motion entirely through an electric discharge 
from the brain. It differs most radically 
from action, which is the mechanical response 
to the chemicals shot by the glands into the 
blood, under the drive of the thought dis- 
charge from the brain. 

Second, this thought discharge is brought 
about only through the stimulus which 
brings together the chromaffin bodies and the 
brain proteins. 

The theory of Cryle sets forth that these 
thought-forming materials are combined ac- 
cording to "brain patterns," the outcome 
of thousands of years of human experience — 
that is, the coming together of chromaffin and 
brain protein and the resultant electrical dis- 
charge is nothing more than a recognition of 
a former experience — of an ancient brain 
pattern in part or whole. These ancient 

adventures of his forbears, faced by con- 

267 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

ditions similar to those confronting him, have 
graven on his brain formulas or "patterns" 
for conduct. 

The orthodox Jew will turn from the 
plumpest and pinkest hog carcass with a 
shudder of disgust. The average Christian 
will yearn for a dish of pork and apple sauce. 
Generations that have regarded the swine as 
unclean have established a definite brain pat- 
tern in the Jew which he follows instinctively. 
So with the Christian; his pattern indicates 
automatically that pigs are good to eat and 
he follows its direction. 

All of our basic brain patterns are so 
Archaic that they now function without our 
conscious consent. They are the result of 
material or fractions of material stored away 
in the mind index by countless generations 
searching for the material to appease the 
three world-old hungers — To Live; To 
Achieve; To Propagate. 

This, then, is the hypothesis. If there is 
nothing to overthrow it — and psychology has 
not yet brought forward any such force — it is 
a logical step farther to say that if one may 
obtain knowledge of the brain patterns of 
another, if he may grasp the secret of how 
the other's mind will react instinctively to 
certain stimuli, that other may be played 

upon as a musician plays upon his violin. 

268 



BRAIN PATTERNS 

There is the essence of leadership — the 
ability to comprehend the natural reaction 
of your followers to external conditions. 
Knowing that reaction, they are yours. 

The brain pattern has been devised by the 
mind through its ancient experience to serve 
as a defense or a profit bearer. Its worthi- 
ness, its place in relation to present-day nor- 
mal human conduct, are of no concern. As 
long as it is held, it functions as though it 
held all the qualities of truth. 

Thus, one may shudder and shrink when a 
perfectly harmless cat enters a room. Here 
is perhaps the old brain pattern of primeval 
man's terror of the lion and tiger at work. 
'Until that pattern is eliminated by the deli- 
cate work of the psychoanalyst, its owner 
cannot help responding to it as though it held 
all the elements of present-day truth. For 
brain patterns may be altered or substituted 
completely under the ministrations of the 
professional or the instinctive psychologist. 

I have a patient who is a successful sales- 
man. I say he is successful because his 
salary is thirty-five thousand dollars a year. 
The basis of his success is his ability to re- 
form and revise the brain patterns of others. 
I do not suppose he spends one hour out 
of fifty in actual business talk. The rest of 

his waking hours are spent, not in "enter- 

269 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

tainment" pure and simple, but in com- 
panionship with his friends, the prospective 
buyers. 

He never talks shop; never expatiates on 
the quality and value of the material he is 
selling. Rather, he waits, carefully building 
up the proper brain pattern, until that pat- 
tern at last brings his client — his rivals say 
"victim" — into the condition where he is 
forced, by his own mind, to purchase. 

The prospective buyer likes him. The 
salesman's house is open to him; he offers 
psychic food when the man is weary or lively, 
gay or lonesome, material food when physical 
hunger needs gratification. In other words, 
the purchasing agent finds the salesman is a 
good old scout whom he cannot do without. 

When the sale day arrives, there is the 
brain pattern designed by my patient, and 
the prospective buyer, following its design, 
proceeds to sign the order. He can no more 
help doing it than you or I can help laughing 
at a joke or shivering at a ghastly tale. 

The ultimate object of all scientific ad- 
venturing is the same — to discover, if possible, 
the shortest formula that will accurately 
include continually recurring events. In 
other words, we strive to fathom the future. 
By establishing presumptive laws in the 
present, we endeavor to ascertain what to- 

270 



BRAIN PATTERNS 

morrow may be. We strive to read the un- 
written word; to visualize the coming event. 

The gift of postulation, of laying down the 
lines along which the future course of life is 
to run, is the foremost heritage of man, no 
matter how mean or feeble the individual to 
postulate may be. 

In an early chapter I pointed out that the 
postulates used by one science to bridge 
chasms and link phenomena may not apply 
at all to another science. Geometry has as 
one of its postulates that a straight line is the 
shortest distance between two points, but 
the physicist will tell you there is no such 
thing as a straight line. 

The atomic hypothesis does not lend itself 
to reality as we know it. This was Dalton's 
postulate to hold together ever - recurring 
phenomena. 

Psychology has assumed a postulate con- 
cerning mind changes that is not in accord 
with the physiological conception, that mind 
changes are invariably accompanied by cor- 
responding physical changes in the brain. 

In its effort to discover convenient laws 
for describing comprehensively the conduct 
of people under well-known stimuli, psy- 
chology has evolved an entirely different 
hypothesis. The mind, this postulate holds, 

has two functioning departments or person- 

271 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

alities. This theory was established to or- 
ganize for consideration two tremendously 
differing forms of conduct — one seen in 
everyday life; the other, in the conduct of 
the so-called insane. 

In examining this postulate, the first thing 
noted in connection with insanities was that 
these contained no materials not found in 
the normal mind. In fact, there seemed to be 
two mind departments, one containing reason 
or logic; the other a department of desire 
dominated by stern necessity and unham- 
pered by the rational part of the mind. 

Thus was established the concept of dual 
personality, brought about by the discovery 
that in most normal people there are ap- 
parently two minds, each driving toward an 
objective and by those drives often brought 
into mortal conflict with each other. 

The brain of each of us has been the battle- 
ground for these conflicting drives. Who of 
us has not pursued some cherished, perhaps 
fantastic, desire, and when questioned con- 
cerning that pursuit has not floundered about 
desperately in search of some logical excuse 
for it? Who has not sought desperately, in 
the department of logic, for some rational 
explanation of our act, first putting forward 
lame excuses and feeble explanations, then 

amending them again and again and, finally 

272 



BRAIN PATTERNS 

driven to the wall, ending by fighting and 
raving as a final inadequate defense ? 

Those who have experienced such a crisis — 
and who has not ? — should comprehend read- 
ily the theory of the disassociation of the two 
departments of the mind and the psycholo- 
gist's claim that these are often in conflict 
with each other. 

It is this conflict that causes insanity — 
these disassociations in greater or less degree 
and under which the department of desire 
proceeds to achieve its ends, free for the mo- 
ment of the department of logic. 

An honest man swindles in business be- 
cause, he says, his wife and children must be 
supported "properly." He has established a 
partial disassociation. His charitable friends 
say with a sigh that he "must have been 
crazy" and come much nearer to the truth 
than they can possibly realize. The margin 
that separates such a man from those termed 
by society actually "insane" is narrow in- 
deed. The swindler has accomplished a par- 
tial disassociation. The maniac has merely 
carried that disassociation farther. 

The "insane man" neglects his department 
of logic entirely, retires altogether from the 
world of reality, and in a world made by him- 
self for that purpose finds the ungratified 
desires bountifully fulfilled. 

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GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

His dominating ego under the stern com- 
mand, "Live, Achieve, Propagate," cannot 
carry out these orders fully in the world of 
reality where the logical mind dominates. 
He cannot conduct himself in an insane 
manner with this guardian watching over him 
that gets him nowhere and brings unendur- 
able failure. What happens? He slams the 
door of the logic compartment and opens the 
portal wide for the desireful mind to come 
forth. 

While the logical mind is under even par- 
tial control, he realizes that the insane acts 
which he contemplates committing would 
bring in turn an unendurable sense of in- 
feriority. Therefore, he temporarily or per- 
manently imprisons this rational mind and 
goes his way. 

Unhampered by logic and reason, his de- 
sires are fed. Starving in the world of reality, 
he finds plenty on every side in the abode of 
the fantasy which he rears for himself. His 
strange conduct, the unreasonable things he 
does, do not humiliate him, for the door of 
logic is shut and barred. 

The insane man who tells all beholders 
that he is the omnipotent emperor of the 
world may ask you for a chew of tobacco, may 
beg the price of a drink, without the least 

sense of humiliation or loss of greatness. 

274 



BRAIN PATTERNS 

Logic or rationality — call it what you please 
— has been banished. 

With the portal of logic shut tight, what 
chance is there of driving the desireful mind 
to cover and reopening the chamber where 
the prisoner is held ? What opportunity have 
we to bring back the maniac to sanity ? Little, 
it would seem; but here is where the psy- 
chologist turns to the inherited brain pat- 
terns of his patient for aid. Through them, 
through the method used by myself in deal- 
ing with my horse-woman, the subject may 
be enticed from his mad palace of fantasy 
back into reality. 

If in our search to aid such a subject we 
can find a definite brain pattern indicated in 
all the strange acts and speech of the crazy 
man, we have the solution of the complex. 
We have the key to the door behind which 
logic is locked away. 

But with the downright insane, such a 
matter is difficult and sometimes impossible, 
for the complex may be complexed over and 
over again until the unraveling of the tangled 
skeins of mentality is far past human ability. 

In the case of my horse-woman, it is doubt- 
ful whether my daily chatter, directed at the 
horse she believed herself to be, had any 
effect whatever on the complex which had 

only the most obscure relation with the basic 

275 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

brain pattern that held the key to the door 
of logic. 

The collie pups, on the other hand, reached 
that pattern through the Archaic drive of 
sex. By reason of their warmth, their hair, 
their appealing helplessness, they crept to 
the door of logic and opened it ever so 
slightly. And through that little opening 
there entered the desire to kiss and fondle. 

Logic stirred again, and the Archaic brain 
pattern which the pups had touched drove 
her to stoop down and gather them up in her 
arms. 



XXI 

LIFE FORMULAS 

IT would have been impossible to con- 
vince Napoleon at the height of his power 
that a nation and a man could not rise to 
pre-eminence through adherence to militar- 
ism. It would be equally futile to-day to 
attempt to convert John D. Rockefeller to 
the belief that money is the root of all evil. 

By warfare Napoleon exalted himself and 
his country. Through finance Rockefeller 
has risen to a position far above the rank and 
file of humanity. 

"My theory of life is wrong ?" either might 
reply to such a doubter. " It can't be wrong. 
Look to what it has brought me." 

Ever and again in his work the psycho- 
analyst encounters a psychopath who un- 
consciously returns the same argument to all 
efforts to bring him back to normality — the 
level of the herd. 

Occasionally the mind mechanic is called 
upon to confront a man who is getting his 

life foods in a manner beyond the pale of 

277 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

modern civilization, but who is getting them 
so successfully that it is impossible to bring 
him back to normality. These are the men- 
tal Napoleons and Rockefellers who, when 
confronted by persons pointing out alleged 
errors in their conduct, reply: 

"Wrong? It can't be wrong. Look at 
what it has brought me!" 

Man is living to achieve — achieve grati- 
fication for the hunger, shelter, sex, and To- 
Be-Great desires. If by his own peculiar 
line of conduct he is satisfying them he will 
not abandon a tried and efficient line of con- 
duct for another whose chief recommenda- 
tion is that it is more conventional. 

One of my own failures in the field of 
psychoanalysis may serve to point out the 
theory more clearly. 

The patient was sent to me by his family. 
He did not come to me of his own accord 
because he was getting all that he needed in 
life in his own way. He had no conscious 
failing or defect. He was quite satisfied 
with his own conduct in life and life's return 
to him. 

It was chiefly to oblige his wife and friends 
upon whom his peculiar obsession reacted 
unpleasantly that he came. His psychopathy 
— that is, the external manifestation of it as 

seen by his associates — consisted of inor- 

278 



LIFE FORMULAS 

dinate drowsiness. He dozed or slumbered 
at most inopportune times. He would nod 
over his desk or his dinner table, utterly 
indifferent to social or business demands. 
What, his associates asked me, could be 
done to break him of his embarrassing habit ? 

My patient had inherited a tremendous 
fortune. From his earliest babyhood this 
wealth and all that it implied had been at 
his beck and call. He had but to say 
" please" and "thank you" and "excuse 
me" and everything that went toward the 
gratification of his life hungers was his. 
Thus, from his earliest memory, he had never 
been obliged to starve the Archaic in his 
nature. He had never been called upon 
to struggle with the hoary old man within 
and disguise him so that he might come be- 
fore the world without shocking the herd. 
Through the magic of unlimited wealth he 
had been able to feed the Archaic directly 
and with little or none of the dissembling 
and substitution common to most of us. 

Because, all his life, "please" and "thank 

you" and "excuse me" had brought him 

everything that he needed his unconscious 

mind with its Archaic desires lay fat and 

inert. These, continually glutted since his 

childhood, had resigned full control of his 

conduct to his conscious mind. 

279 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

In short, this formula, this line of conduct 
toward life, had brought him food to reple- 
tion for his Archaic hungers. It would have 
been impossible to point out to him a better 
method of procedure than his own of saying 
"please" and "thank you" and enjoying the 
fruits thereof. 

A splendidly appointed city home, broad 
acres in the country, a battalion of servants, 
a wife and children, all were his. They to- 
gether gratified the three great Archaic hun- 
gers to repletion. Clearly, then, his sudden 
and unaccountable slumberings were not for 
the sublimation of any of these. 

There remained in my search for the cause, 
then, only two hypotheses. He might have 
some physical ailment that produced this 
torpid condition, or else the fourth great 
hunger that drives man forward, the desire 
To Be Great, was finding in sleep what it was 
unable to obtain in his waking hours. 

A physical examination destroyed the 
first theory. The man was as strong as a 
horse. 

Clearly, then, it was to be presumed that 
his sleeping fits were for the purpose of 
gratifying his To-Be-Great desire, giving him 
achievement and recognition denied him in 
his waking hours. To confirm this theory 

it was necessary to get at the content of his 

280 



LIFE FORMULAS 

dreams — no easy matter, for the Psychic 
Censor of his conscious mind stood a jealous 
guardian over this secret. 

Before delving into the manifest content of 
his dream life I classified him anthropologi- 
cally, and thus obtained another clue. His 
eyes I graded, according to the chart given at 
the end of this book, as 90 per cent blond and 
10 per cent brunet. His nose and forehead 
gave the same result — 90 per cent blond, 
10 per cent brunet. 

Here was a man whose inheritance would 
tend overwhelmingly to drive him to physical 
exploitation and achievement. This desire 
would be nine times as strong as the con- 
ceptual impulse. 

Man cannot smother these physical drives 
which are wrapped up in the very tissues of 
his body. They must find their outlet some- 
how, if not through direct action, then 
through the safety valve of dreams. 

My patient had inherited an enterprise 
from an uncle — a business which, because 
of the vast wealth behind it and the subor- 
dinates that directed it, ran along well 
enough whether he interfered or not. But 
family pride on his and his relatives' parts 
had decreed that he must remain at least its 
titular head; that he must appear at his 

office and be regarded as the driver of the 

19 281 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

commercial machine which his uncle had 
guided before him. 

Therefore he sat each day at his desk, and 
while there gave himself over earnestly to 
purely mental, conceptual effort. Yet. be- 
cause only one tenth of his make-up leaned 
toward this type of work he could not 
achieve. Respect and deference were shown 
him, but not the recognition and praise that 
his To-Be-Great desire needed. By his 
physique and its character and his early 
"education" he was barred from conceptual 
exploitation, to the end product of achieve- 
ment. 

I found that on his summer and winter 
vacation he sought the seashore, as his light 
eyes had told me he must. There he swam 
and sailed his yacht and spent his days in 
physical achievement. During these vaca- 
tions, he told me naively, he never felt 
drowsy. Yet over his desk in the office he 
nodded all day long. 

Of course he did. He had tamed his 
Archaic desires by constant feeding. One 
great drive remained for him to satisfy. He 
had to obtain greatness. By his physical in- 
heritance he could not obtain this at a desk 
in an office. Therefore he sought slumber 
in which to exalt himself by dreams. 

When I finally induced him to tell me the 

zSz 



LIFE FORMULAS 

content of his dreams and visions, I found, 
as I had suspected, that they were always 
visions of swift action, in which he was the 
hero. In them he, by his good right arm, by 
his skill and bravery, overcame all resistance, 
was the strongest of the strong, the most 
daring of the daring. In his dreams he was 
finding the physical achievement and recog- 
nition lost to him in the life imposed upon 
him by destiny and his family. 

There was nothing to be done for him. 
By his wealth the Archaic desires were fat- 
tened and stall fed. Through his dreams he 
was getting in the life of slumber those 
things denied him in the life of waking. 

The fault lay not with him, but with his 
family. They, not the man to whom they 
sent him, could cure my patient of his habit 
of drowsiness by adapting their lives to his 
life's demands. They did not. He still 
dreams his wonderful dreams of action, be- 
cause those who love him and the circle of 
herd life into which he was born have de- 
creed that he who should have been a sailor, 
an explorer, an adventurer, remain tethered 
to an office chair. 

The corridor of evolution, through which 
man has journeyed from the slime of First 
Things to this day, runs ever uphill. Its 
floor is beset with obstacles and pitfalls, and 

283 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

fearful things lie in wait to pounce upon the 
traveler — hu mani ty . 

Before us that same corridor still stretches 
away, no man knows whither, although the 
dreamer now and again catches a half vision 
of what lies at its end. Its course is forever 
upward, and the traveler who stumbles along 
it catches his feet in the same obstacles and 
fights back the same enemies that beset those 
from whom he received the torch of life. 

For it is only through battle that man has 
lifted himself from the ooze of primeval 
things. The history of the race is the his- 
tory of unending warfare against tremendous 
odds, with the victory that is to crown the 
end of the journey still a long way off. 

Each man at birth throws down a gauge of 
combat against the world, even as mankind in 
general accepted such strife millions of years 
ago at the Beginning. The life of each of us is 
filled with the din of conflict for the four great 
things without which man cannot live — the 
Archaic Three and the desire To Be Great. 

It is to make more effective his battle 
against the universe that man has taken 
upon himself his present culture. The rules 
of herd life, the elements of civilization, are 
merely war engines invented by man for the 
purpose of getting what he needs in the best 

and quickest way. 

284 



LIFE FORMULAS 

The obstacles and blockages which he has 
been forced to overcome are responsible for 
his field of vision, his vocabulary, all that 
separates him from the brute. If food and 
drink, if sex gratification, if shelter, had been 
always at man's hand, he would still be wal- 
lowing in the muck of First Things. The 
pursuit of these essentials and of the desire 
To Be Great that grew out of them has 
hurried him along the corridor of evolution 
to outstrip by far the rest of the animate 
world. 

Had these things been as easy of attain- 
ment as the air we breathe, man would be 
to-day far below the present level he has 
obtained in his unending fight. 

Yet while the great fighting phalanx of hu- 
manity presses doggedly forward, the battle 
does not rage with equal intensity all along 
its front. Here one rank meets with little 
opposition and goes forward with triumphant 
song; there the pressure of the foe forces 
another to give ground doggedly. One man 
fights through life on the offensive, capturing 
spoils of war and exulting in his victory. 
Another, because of the post that has been 
assigned him in the battle line, struggles 
desperately on the defensive, clenches his 
teeth, and uses all his might to stand up 
against overwhelming odds. 

285 



GETTING WHAT WE WANT 

"Life," says the victorious one, the op- 
timist, "is sweet." 

"Life," snarls the hard beset, the pessimist, 
"is treacherous and bitter." 

Small wonder, when they meet to discuss 
their warfare, that mutiny arises in the ranks 
of humanity. Their views are as irreconcil- 
able as was Marie Antoinette's and the 
Parisian sans-culotte's. 

"If they can't get bread, let them eat 
cake," is the careless speech of one who had 
encountered small resistance in her own life 
battle. On this and similar assertions has 
hung much of the woe in the world. 

Yet it is not impossible that man may 
change his shield and heavy armor of pes- 
simism for the charger and lance of the 
optimist. It does not rest alone with the 
fortune of the battle and his place in the 
ranks. 

Muchofitisinhisownhands. Evolutionhas 
given him a body. It rests with him whether 
this is cared for or neglected and upon him 
is visited the result of this care or neglect. 

And man, in the last century, has begun to 

discover that his mind, heretofore regarded 

as something too abstract and irresponsible 

to be governed by laws, is, after all, as much 

a mechanism and a creature of the painful 

craftsmanship of evolution as his body. 

286 



LIFE FORMULAS 

Much is still to be learned of the working 
and the needs of that magical machine, but 
the broad rules by which it may be driven 
toward success rather than disaster are 
already formulated. 

By following these rules, by identifying 
and guiding the impulses of the machine, by 
tending it and caring for it as some of us 
have learned to tend and care for our bodies, 
man can more often turn pessimism into 
optimism, defensive warfare into offensive. 

Into the hands of each of us the mind 
machine is given at birth — a delicate, in- 
tricate, tremendous mechanism, more power- 
ful than anything that can ever be evolved 
by the skill of man. Let the hand that 
steers it and controls the throttle be un- 
skilled, and existence becomes a matter of 
luck. Man is thrown haphazard into the 
fortunes of war. But let a skilled mechanic 
guide the machine, and the limits of space 
itself are not too remote a goal for it to 
achieve and pass. 

"It is not in our stars, dear Brutus, but in 
ourselves that we are underlings/' 

THE END 



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